Preamble

The House met at a Quarter before Three of the Clock, Mr. SPEAKER in the Chair.

PRIVATE BUSINESS.

Private Bills (Standing Orders not previously inquired into complied with),—Mr. SPEAKER laid upon the Table Report from one of the Examiners of Petitions for Private Bills, That, in the case of the following Bill, referred on the Second Reading thereof, the Standing Orders not previously in quired into, which arc applicable thereto, have been complied with, namely:

Railways (North Western and Midland Group) Bill.

Bill committed.

Private Bills [Lords] (Standing Orders not previously inquired into complied with),—Mr. SPEAKER laid upon the Table Report from one of the Examiners of Petitions for Private Bills, That, in the case of the following Bill, originating in the Lords, and referred on the First Reading thereof, the Standing Orders not previously inquired into, which are applicable thereto, have been complied with, namely:

Trafford Park Bill [Lords].

Bill to be read a Second time.

Private Bill Petitions (Standing Orders not complied with),—Mr. SPEAKER laid upon the Table Report from one of the Examiners of Petitions for Private Bills, That, in the case of the Petition for the following Bill, the Standing Orders have not been complied with, namely:

Exeter Corporation.

Report referred to the Select Committee, on Standing Orders.

Private Bills (Petition for additional Provision) (Standing Orders not complied with),—Mr. SPEAKER laid upon the Table Report from one of the Examiners of Petitions for Private
Bills, That, in the case of the Petition for additional Provision in the following Bill, the Standing Orders have not been complied with, namely:

London County Council (General Powers) Bill.

Report referred to the Select Committee on Standing Orders.

Railways (West Scottish Group) Bill (by Order),

Second Reading deferred till Friday, 5th May.

Ministry of Health Provisional Orders (Leeds and Bradford Extension) Bill (by Order),

Second Reading deferred till Tomorrow.

MINISTRY OF HEALTH PROVISIONAL ORDERS (No. 2) BILL,

"to confirm certain Provisional Orders of the Minister of Health relating to Bingley, Birkenhead, Bognor, Chichester, and Weymouth and Melcombe Regis," presented by Sir ALFRED MOND; read the First time; and referred to the Examiners of Petitions for Private Bills, and to be printed. [Bill 96.]

MINISTRY OF HEALTH PROVISIONAL ORDERS (No. 3) BILL,

"to confirm certain Provisional Orders of the Minister of Health relating to Derby, Ellesmere Port and Whitby, Nowark, Oldham, and the Rhymney Valley Sewerage Board," presented by Sir ALFRED MOND; read the First time; and referred to the Examiners of Petitions for Private Bills, and to be printed. [Bill 97.]

MINISTRY OF HEALTH PROVISIONAL ORDER (WATER) BILL,

"to confirm a Provisional Order of the Minister of Health relating to Rainham Water," presented by Sir ALFRED MOND; read the First time; and referred to the Examiners of Petitions for Private Bills, and to be printed. [Bill 98.]

TRAMWAY PROVISIONAL ORDER BILL,

"to confirm a Provisional Order made by the Minister of Transport under the Tramways Act, 1870, relating to Morecambe Corporation Tramways," presented by Mr. NEAL; read the First time; and referred to the Examiners of Petitions for Private Bills, and to be printed. [Bill 99.]

Oral Answers to Questions — PENSION TREATMENT ALLOWANCE (MR. A. C. CUNLIFFE).

Lieut.-Colonel W. GUINNESS: 1.
asked the Minister of Pensions whether ho is aware that on 23rd November, 1921, the Ministry of Pensions admitted the claim of Mr. A. C. Cunliffe to £179 10s. 9d. as arrears of treatment allowance; that on 24th December £50 was paid by the local war pensions committee; that in spite of repeated applications he has been quite unable to obtain the balance of £129 10s. 9d. due to him; that Mr. Cunliffe's pension of 12s. 8d. a week was cancelled on 13th February last and a larger award of 25s. 5d. weekly substituted; and that the ring paper has now been supplied to Mr. Cunliffe authorising him to draw his first payment at the higher rate from 12th April without any provision for the payment of arrears from 13th February; that Mr. Cunliffe's family are practically destitute on account of the failure of the authorities to meet his admitted claims; and what steps the Ministry proposes to take in this matter?

The PARLIAMENTARY SECRETARY to the MINISTRY of PENSIONS (Major Tryon): There has, unfortunately, been some difficulty in connection with this case, but I am glad to say that the arrears mentioned in both parts of the question have now been paid.

Oral Answers to Questions — CIVIL AVIATION.

Mr. L'ESTRANGE MALONE: 2.
asked the Secretary of State for Air whether he can make a statement in regard to the appointment of a Controller-General for civil aviation?

The SECRETARY of STATE for AIR (Captain Guest): When introducing the Air Estimates on the 21st March, I said that it was my intention to re-organise the Department of Civil Aviation as a directorate. I am afraid I am not yet in a position to announce the name of the new Director.

Mr. MALONE: Is the right hon. and gallant Gentleman aware of the strong feeling, both in the country and in the
House, that enough is not being done for civil aviation; and can he say whether a day will be given for the discussion of this important matter?

Captain GUEST: That rests in the hands of the House.

Commander BELLAIRS: When the proposed re-organisation takes place, will care be taken that civil aviation is not made subordinate to the military aviation side?

Captain GUEST: Most certainly.

Mr. RAPER: When the remaining Votes are taken, shall we be allowed a wide discussion upon them?

Mr. MALONE: Is the right hon. and gallant Gentleman aware that when the Air Estimates were discussed before, civil aviation was ruled out, and all discussion was precluded?

Captain GUEST: That was done intentionally, so that certain Votes might still be left for discussion.

Mr. MALONE: 3.
asked the Secretary of State for Air the composition of the Advisory Committee on Civil Aviation; what interests each member represents; whether the Committee has yet met; and whether any date has been fixed for the conclusion of its Report?

Captain GUEST: With the permission of my hon. Friend, I will circulate the reply in the OFFICIAL REPORT, the particulars being rather long.

Following is the reply:

The Advisory Committee on Civil Aviation, presided over by Lord Weir, has been replaced, as announced at the Air Conference, by a permanent Civil Aviation Advisory Board, to which it is presumed my hon. Friend refers.

The composition of this Board and the interests represented by each member are as follow:

The Under-Secretary of State for Air (Chairman) (the Right Hon. Lord Gorell, C.B.E., M.C.).
The Director-General of Supply and Research (Air Vice-Marshal Sir W. G. H. Salmond, K.C.M.G., C.B., D.S.O.).
The Director of Civil Aviation.

Representatives of—

General Post Office (Brigadier-General F. H. Williamson, C.B.E.).
Accident Offices Association (Mr. J. C. McBride).
Air League of the British Empire (Major-General Sir W. Sefton Brancker, K.C.B., A.F.C.).
Association of British Chambers of Commerce (Mr. Stanley Machin, J. P.).
Federation of British Industries (Mr. H. James Yates).
Institute of Transport (Sir Wm. Joynson-Hicks, Bart., M.P.).
Lloyds (Lieut.-Colonel Sir Frederick Hall, K.B.E., D.S.O., M.P.).
Royal Aero Club (Brigadier-General Sir Capel Holden, K.C.B., F.R.S.).
Royal Aeronautical Society (Lieut. -Colonel Mervyn O'Gorman, C.B.).
Society of British Aircraft Constructors, Limited (Sir Henry White-Smith, C.B.E.).
Mr. F. G. L. Bertram, C.B.E. (Secretary).

Four meetings of the Board and three meetings of its Technical Committee have so far been held. The Board is a continuing one, and will report from time to time on questions remitted to it for consideration. No dates for the rendering of the reports have been fixed.

Oral Answers to Questions — CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPE (TRANSPORT FACILITIES).

Sir HARRY BRITTAIN: 4.
asked the Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs whether he can make a statement as to the present position in Central and Eastern Europe with regard to the free passage of private goods wagons across the respective frontiers?

Mr. McCURDY (Joint Parliamentary Secretary to the Treasury): My hon. Friend (Mr. Cecil Harmsworth) regrets that he is unable to give the information required, and would suggest that it would be useless to obtain the information now, while the Conference at Genoa is attempting to deal comprehensively with the general question of transport in Central and Eastern Europe, with a view-to re-organising the whole system.

Sir H. BRITTAIN: Is it not a fact that an arrangement was made to carry this provision into effect on the 1st March, and what is the reason for the impossibility of finding out? This has been holding up the whole trade of Central Europe more than anything else.

Mr. McCURDY: The hon. Member must put down a further question.

Oral Answers to Questions — TELEPHONE EXCHANGE, SHEFFIELD (CONTRACT).

Mr. MANVILLE: 7.
asked the hon. and gallant Member for the Pollok Division of Glasgow as representing the First Commissioner of Works if he is aware that the Office of Works has let a contract for the construction of the buildings of the new telephone exchange in Sheffield to the Wholesale Co-operative Society; and is it to be the policy of the Government in the future to place contracts in the hands of this or similar organisations which, under the present system of taxation, contribute nothing to the maintenance of the country?

Lieut.-Colonel Sir J. GILMOUR (for the First Commissioner of Works): A contract for perliminary work upon the site for a new telephone exchange at Sheffield has been let to the Co-operative Wholesale Society, which submitted the lowest competitive tender. The Office of Works is satisfied that the firm is capable of executing the work in accordance with its requirements as to time and quality of craftsmanship. The decision is based on the general policy of economy. This consideration is entirely separate and distinct from any question as to the taxation of Co-operative Societies. On that question I would refer my hon. Friend to the evidence given before the Royal Commission on the Income Tax and to the Report of the Commission published in March, 1920 (Cmd. 645), from which he will find that the suggestion contained in the last part of his question is based upon a misapprehension.

Mr. MANVILLE: Does the hon. and gallant Gentleman know the indignation which exists amongst the traders of this country at such a contract being placed with an association of that nature, which contributes nothing whatever to the upkeep of the Government or the country;
and is he aware of the speech that was made in this House by the Leader of the House when Chancellor of the Exchequer, in which he stated that the greater the success of the co-operative movement, the more intolerable that position became to everybody else, and the more impossible it became——

Mr. SPEAKER: The hon. Member is going beyond a supplementary question.

Mr. MANVILLE: On a point of Order. According to your ruling a few weeks ago, I had to put this question to the head of the Department concerned, and obviously it is a question that can only be answered by the Leader of the House. May I put it down to him?

Mr. SPEAKER: The hon. Member appeared to be quoting from some speech in the House, and in a question that could not be admitted in any case. It could only be used in debate.

Oral Answers to Questions — GOVERNMENT DEPARTMENTS (FUEL, LIGHT, ETC.).

Captain Viscount CURZON: 8.
asked the hon. and gallant Member for the Pollok Division of Glasgow, as representing the First Commissioner of Works, what is the total expenditure required upon fuel, light, and household requisites in Government Departments for 1922–23; how the expenditure of fuel, light, and household effects is controlled and supervised; and whether, seeing that such expenditure could be greatly reduced by adopting a system of rationing, he is prepared to adopt such a system?

Sir J. GILMOUR: The estimated expenditure for fuel, light, and household requisites for the year 1922–23 on Votes administered by my Department is approximately £972,000. Careful and continuous control and supervision are exercised by technical officers. A comprehensive scheme of rationing fuel has been in operation for about four years, and notable economies have been effected. The rationing of light and household articles presents great difficulties, but a modified system has been adopted as far as practicable and substantial economies have been effected.

Viscount CURZON: Does the hon. and gallant Gentleman not think that some
reduction is possible on an expenditure of nearly £1,000,000 on these services?

Sir J. GILMOUR: We are doing our best to bring that about.

Oral Answers to Questions — HYDE PAPK.

Viscount CURZON: 9.
asked the hon. and gallant Member for the Pollok Division, of Glasgow, as representing the First Commissioner of Works, whether any steps can be taken to restore the flower beds in Hyde Park for the benefit of the public before the summer; and, If so, whether, in the interests of economy, tenders can be invited from the large horticultural firms for all or part of the work?

Sir J. GILMOUR: The First Commissioner is giving careful consideration to this suggestion, but I fear that it may be too late to take any action during the present summer.

Oral Answers to Questions — ROYAL PARKS (PHOTOGRAPHY).

Sir H. BRITTAIN: 10.
asked the hon. and gallant Member for the Pollok Division of Glasgow, as representing the First Commissioner of Works, whether the question of photography in the royal parks has now been decided?

Sir J. GILMOUR: Permits will not in future be necessary for hand cameras in the unenclosed portions of the parks, but as the unrestricted use of stand and cinematograph cameras might cause obstruction and lead to infringement of the general regulations in regard to trading in the parks, the First Commissioner does not see his way to modify the rules in these respects.

Sir H. BRITTAIN: I thank the hon. and gallant Gentleman for the first part of his answer.

Oral Answers to Questions — UNEMPLOYMENT (STATISTICS).

Mr. TREVELYAN THOMSON: 13.
asked the Minister of Labour the number of unemployed registered for the previous week and the total amount paid in unemployment benefit?

The MINISTER of LABOUR (Dr. Macnamara): On 10th April, the latest date for which figures are available, the
number of persons registered as wholly unemployed in Great Britain was 1,648,748. In addition, 203,684 were claiming benefit while on short time. The amount paid in respect of the week ending on 5th April in unemployment benefit, including dependants' grants, was about £1,100,000.

Oral Answers to Questions — HOUSING.

Mr. T. THOMSON: 15.
asked the Minister of Health the number of houses now completed and occupied under the Government's various housing schemes, the number in course of construction, and the number of applications received by local authorities requiring still to be met?

The MINISTER of HEALTH (Sir Alfred Mond): I would refer the hon. Member to the reply which I gave him yesterday regarding progress on the State-aided housing schemes. I have no information as to the number of applications for houses received by local authorities.

Mr. THOMSON: Will the right hon. Gentleman communicate with local authorities, to ascertain what their position is to-day, seeing that he discredits what they stated two years ago?

Sir A. MOND: I will consider that.

Oral Answers to Questions — BRITISH MANUFACTURED GOODS (TARIFFS).

Mr. DOYLE: 18.
asked the President of the Board of Trade the relative increase in tariffs imposed upon British manufactured and semi-manufactured goods during the last two years by the following countries: The United States, France, Belgium, Italy, Germany, Japan, the British Overseas Dominions, Holland, the Scandinavian States and Greece, respectively; and, where any such additions have been made, what protest was made?

The PARLIAMENTARY SECRETARY to the BOARD of TRADE (Sir W. Mitchell-Thomson): It is not possible to give any general estimate of the relative increases of the import duties on United Kingdom goods in the countries mentioned since the beginning of 1920. Such changes as have been made in the tariffs of the United States, Holland, Sweden,
Norway and Denmark have been of a minor character, and have not, generally speaking, affected our staple exports. In Japan and Greece increases of duty have been somewhat more important, but we have treaties fixing the rates for the most important classes of our exports. In France, Italy, Belgium and Germany, increases of duty on a comprehensive scale have been introduced; but only in regard to the French and Italian tariff revisions has any large volume of complaint been received from United Kingdom exporters, and in both cases formal representations have been made by His Majesty's Government. As regards the Dominions, the new Australian tariff, whilst increasing many of the duties, at the same time increased the preference on our goods; the New Zealand revision was distinctly favourable to our trade. The general increase of the level of the Newfoundland duties has not given rise to any protests, and Canada and South Africa have maintained their tariffs practically unchanged.

Oral Answers to Questions — PUBLIC SERVANTS, IRELAND.

Sir JOHN BUTCHER: 11.
asked the Secretary of State for the Colonies whether the House will be given the opportunity during the passage of the Bill for confirming the Free State Constitution, or on some other occasion, of considering, and, if necessary, amending, the terms and conditions on which public servants in Ireland will retire, or be discharged, and pensioned, so far at any rate as these terms and conditions are not settled by the Government of Ireland Bill, 1920?

The CHIEF SECRETARY for IRELAND (Sir Hamar Greenwood): My right hon. Friend (Mr. Churchill) has asked me to answer this question. Yes, Sir. I hope that an opportunity for considering this matter will arise during the passage through this House of the Bill for confirming the Free State Constitution.

Sir J. BUTCHER: Shall we have an opportunity, then, of amending, if necessary, the provisions for dealing with civil servants?

Sir H. GREENWOOD: I cannot add anything to the answer I have given to my hon. and learned Friend.

Sir J. BUTCHER: Have the Government really not made up their mind as to whether this House is to have an opportunity of considering the terms under which our Civil Service in Ireland is to be dealt with?

Sir H. GREENWOOD: I have answered my hon. and learned Friend. This identical question has been dealt with several times in the course of debate, and will be effectively dealt with, I hope, when the debate arises with which my answer deals.

Sir J.BUTCHER: Cannot the right hon. Gentleman answer a very simple question? Will this House be able to amend, if desired, the provisions dealing with the Civil Service?

Sir H. GREENWOOD: Of course the House will have absolute power to reject or amend the Constitution, or do exactly what it likes.

Sir J. BUTCHER: I am very sorry, but what I want to know is whether, if we do not desire to reject these provisions, we can amend them in such a way as will be in consonance with justice?

Mr. SPEAKER: That is a matter for each individual Member.

Oral Answers to Questions — ROADS (MAINTENANCE AND IMPROVEMENT).

Captain TERRELL: 20.
asked the Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Transport whether, in view of the anticipated increased use of the roads this year by motor transport, he will arrange for a comprehensive investigation of the effect of wear and tear on the service with the ultimate object of reconsidering the whole question of financial upkeep?

The PARLIAMENTARY SECRETARY to the MINISTRY of TRANSPORT (Mr. Neal): The effect of various types of road vehicles on road surfaces receives the constant attention of the officers of the Roads Department, and many of the recommendations in the recently issued Report of the Departmental Committee on the Regulation of Road Vehicles bear directly upon the question. I may add that the cost of road maintenance and improvement has for some time been receiving serious consideration in the Department, and Committees of County Surveyors and
County Borough Engineers have been formed in each division of the country, for an examination, in consultation with the Divisional Road Engineer of the Ministry of Transport, of all questions bearing on economy in highway construction and maintenance.

Oral Answers to Questions — SCOTLAND.

HOLDING (GLEN ORCHY).

Major MACKENZIE WOOD: 21.
asked the Secretary for Scotland the total expenditure incurred by the Board of Agriculture for Scotland in connection with the holding known as Tom-na-Gualinn, Glen Orchy; and how much rent has been paid by the tenant?

The LORD ADVOCATE (Mr. C. D. Murray): The total expenditure which has been incurred by the Board of Agriculture for Scotland in connection with the case referred to by my hon. and gallant Friend is £285 19s. 1d. The amount received from Mr. Cameron for rent was £58.

DIRECTOR OF LAND SETTLEMENT.

Major M. WOOD: 22.
asked the Secretary for Scotland whether Sir Arthur Rose, D.S.O., still retains the position of Director of Land Settlement on the Board of Agriculture for Scotland; how many proposed schemes for land settlement have been abandoned by the Board since his appointment in 1920; how many men have actually been settled on the land upon schemes initiated by him; whether Sir Arthur was employed in transport work during the coal strike; how much remuneration he has received in return for all the duties specified above; and whether Sir Arthur retained his interest in the firm of Messrs. Craig and Rose, paint and varnish manufacturers, Leith, during the period he was engaged in Government work?

Mr. MURRAY: The reply to the first part of the question is in the negative. The appointment of Sir Arthur Rose as Director of Land Settlement under the Board of Agriculture for Scotland was a temporary appointment and was terminated at his request on the 31st of March. During his tenure of office the Board decided not to proceed with 19 proposed schemes of land settlement, and
withdrew 19 notices of their intention to prepare schemes. Under schemes initiated by Sir Arthur Rose, 532 holders have been settled to date. It is anticipated that the arrangements made under his direction will result ultimately in the settlement of a further number, of holders estimated at 890. He also directed the settlement of 694 holders under schemes initiated prior to his appointment. During the mining dispute of last year Sir Arthur Rose gave valuable help in maintaining the necessary public services, but received no extra remuneration for the performance of these duties. As Director of Land Settlement he received a salary of £1,200 per annum with the usual bonus in respect of the increased cost of living. With regard to the last part of the question, I would refer my hon. and gallant Friend to the reply to his question of the 27th of April, 1920, given by my right hon. Friend. In the special circum. stances of this appointment, it was arranged that Sir Arthur Rose should be allowed facilities for exercising some measure of supervision over his permanent business interests on the understanding that his official duties would have first call upon his services. This understanding has been most loyally observed, and I may add that Sir Arthur's work in connection with land settlement is not the least of many public services which he has rendered.

Oral Answers to Questions — PEACE TREATIES.

REPARATION, HUNGARY.

Colonel WEDGWOOD: 23.
asked the Prime Minister whether he is aware that the Reparation Commission on 7th March ordered Hungary to pay 28,750 head of livestock, emphasising the fact that this demand is only an advance on the amount of reparations payable; how much of this livestock this country will secure; how many head of stock did Rumania take; was that credited to Hungary; and whether, in the interests; of reconstruction and peace, these continual demands upon a bankrupt and starving country will now be stopped?

The FINANCIAL SECRETARY to the TREASURY (Mr. Hilton Young): I am informed that the livestock referred to by the hon. and gallant Member was de-
manded from Hungary by the Reparation Commission on 8th March, 1922, under paragraph 2a of Annex IV to Part VIII of the Treaty of Trianon, to meet immediate requirements of Italy, Serbia and Greece for the replacement of animals seized, consumed or destroyed by Hungary or destroyed in direct consequence of military operations. No demand for livestock was made by Great Britain. I assume that the hon. Member refers in the third part of his question to requisitions carried out in Hungary after the Armistice by the Rumanian army. I understand that the Reparation Commission is examining the questions arising out of these requisitions, the settlement of which has been confided under Article 181 of the Treaty of Trianon to the Reparation Commission. As regards the last part of the question, I am informed that the Reparation Commission, after full inquiry, and after considering written and verbal representations from the Hungarian Government, was satisfied that the delivery of the small amount of livestock demanded was within Hungary's capacity and could be made without injury to her social and economic life.

Colonel WEDGWOOD: Are we to understand that this is the last demand, or that there may be a recurrence of these demands for livestock?

Mr. YOUNG: That is entirely a question for the Reparation Commission which I cannot answer.

Lieut. Commander KENWORTHY: Is the hon. Gentleman aware that the Rumanian Army practically stripped the eastern part of Hungary of all cattle; and will our representative on the Reparation Commission concur in this particularly harsh demand? May I have an answer?

Mr. YOUNG: I am afraid I do not understand to what demand my hon. and gallant Friend refers. If he requires information in addition to that which I have given in my answer, as to the action of our representative on the Reparation Commission, I shall certainly want notice in order to ascertain exactly what the action was.

Sir H. BRITTAIN: Is it strictly accurate to describe Hungary to-day as a starving country?

Colonel WEDGWOOD: Seeing that this question has been on the Paper for over three weeks, cannot the hon. Gentleman give me an answer to the last part of the question—whether, in the interests of reconstruction and peace, these continual demands upon a bankrupt and starving country will now be stopped?

Mr. YOUNG: In the latter part of the hon. and gallant Gentleman's question there are implications that hardly call for answer from a Minister. Of course, one does not accept all these implications on every occasion. As a matter of fact the facts I have already given, I think, answer the substance of the last part of the question.

REPARATION, GERMANY.

CAPTAIN TERRELL: 27.
asked the Prime Minister if he will state the present attitude of the German Government towards the demands of the Reparation Commission; and whether the Allies propose to take any action, and, if so, of what nature, to compel it to observe its obligations?

Mr. HOGGE: 29.
asked the Prime Minister whether he can make any statement as to the negotiations regarding German reparations?

Mr. YOUNG: The present situation of the question affecting Germany's reparation payments during the year 1922 may be gathered from the terms of a letter from the German Government to the Reparation Commission of the 7th instant, and a reply thereto of the 13th instant, both of which documents have been published. I am forwarding copies to the hon. Members. I would add that the questions at issue are within the competence of the Reparation Commission, and that it is not for the Allied Governments to take any action unless and until the matter is referred to them by the Commission under Paragraph 17 of Annex II to Part VIII of the Treaty of Versailles.

Captain W. BENN: May I ask the Leader of the House whether this Government is committed to any joint military action with France in respect of the Ruhr if the French demands are not met by 31st May?

Mr. SPEAKER: Notice should be given of that question.

HOUSE OF LORDS REFORM.

Viscount CURZON: 25.
asked the Prime Minister whether he can yet state when the Government intend to introduce their proposals for the reform of the House of Lords?

Mr. CHAMBERLAIN (Leader of the House): I would refer my Noble Friend to the answer which I gave to my hon. and gallant Friend the Member for Fylde on the 5th April.

Captain WEDGWOOD BENN: In view of the constant delay, may I ask whether the Government still intend to pass these Measures into law before this Parliament dissolves?

Mr. CHAMBERLAIN: I can add nothing whatever to what I have already stated.

MINISTERIAL OFFICES (REDUCTION).

Captain TERRELL: 26.
asked the Prime Minister whether, in the interests of public economy, he has considered, or will consider, a decrease in the number of Ministerial posts?

Mr. CHAMBERLAIN: The offices of Ministers of Food, Shipping and Munitions have already been abolished. The continuance of the office of Minister of Transport is required by Statute, but the work is mainly done by the Parliamentary Under-Secretary and the Minister receives no salary. One of the Patronage Secretaries also receives no salary. This is as far as we can go at present.

Captain TERRELL: Can the right hon. Gentleman state any reason why the Ministerial posts at present held by the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, the Minister of Labour, the Secretary for Mines, and the Minister for the Overseas Trade Department should not be at once abolished in the interests of economy?

Mr. CHAMBERLAIN: Yes, Sir; on a suitable occasion I can give an answer to all those questions.

Captain TERRELL: Is it not the fact that the Geddes Committee, appointed by the Government themselves, recommended that the Minister for the Overseas Trade Department should be abolished at once, and, if that is so, may we have reasons why that has not been carried out?

Mr. CHAMBERLAIN: There is no such Ministry in existence, and when a suggestion was made that the Department of Overseas Trade should be abolished an immediate protest was raised by the interests concerned.

Captain TERRELL: Arising out of that, is it not the fact——

Mr. SPEAKER: The hon. and gallant Member wants a Debate!

GENOA CONFERENCE.

Mr. HOGGE: 30.
asked the Prime Minister whether he can say how long the Genoa Conference is likely to last?

Mr. CHAMBERLAIN: No, Sir.

GREECE (LOAN).

Mr. L. MALONE: 35.
asked the Chancellor of the Exchequer what securities, and what amount of each security, have His Majesty's Government consented to the release of in order to facilitate the raising of a loan by the Greek Government?

Mr. YOUNG: The hon. Member misconceives this transaction. As has been stated on several occasions, under an agreement of February, 1918, the Greek Government could not assign the security of Greek revenues to a new loan until Greek war debts to this country were repaid without the consent of His Majesty's Government. This assent was given in order that the Greek Government might be put in a position of equality with other would-be borrowers in negotiating a market loan. No such loan has, in fact, been raised.

FOOT-AND-MOUTH DISEASE.

Mr. WATERSON: 36.
asked the Minister of Agriculture whether he has declined to pay a claim for compensation made by the Pendleton Co-operative Society in respect of carcases condemned after slaughter through foot-and-mouth disease; whether similar claims in respect of carcases condemned after slaughter in the Manchester abattoirs have been paid by the Board of Agriculture; and, if so, what are the grounds for the differential treatment of these respective claims?

The MINISTER of AGRICULTURE (Sir Arthur Boscawen): The answer to the first two parts of the question is in the affirmative. The circumstances of the two cases are, however, quite different. In the Pendleton case the animals were slaughtered in the ordinary course of business, and some of the carcases were subsequently condemned by the local sanitary inspector. The Ministry has no power to pay compensation in such a case. In the Manchester case, foot-and-mouth disease was discovered among live animals awaiting slaughter in the public abattoir. To prevent the disease spreading amongst the large number of animals there, and to secure the early disinfection of the premises, the Ministry entered into an agreement, as an exceptional measure, to pay compensation for any carcases which might be condemned on condition that all the animals were slaughtered immediately. This condition was complied with, and out of the 626 animals which were slaughtered compensation was paid for 13 carcases only.

Captain TERRELL: Has the outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease been completely stamped out?

Sir A. BOSCAWEN: Not completely, but I am glad to say that last week we only had three outbreaks, compared with 300 in a week a short time ago.

Mr. WATERSON: In view of the dissatisfaction, will the right hon. Gentleman be prepared to receive a deputation with regard to this decision? That would probably clear the air.

Sir A. BOSCAWEN: I do not think so. If I were to receive deputations whenever there was dissatisfaction, I should be doing nothing else.

NATIONAL LEGISLATURES.

Lieut.-Colonel MURRAY: 24.
asked the Prime Minister whether, having regard to the growing congestion of business in this House, he will, simultaneously with the introduction of proposals to reform the House of Lords, frame and introduce a Bill to devolve upon Scotland, Wales and England the legislative control of their own national affairs?

Mr. CHAMBERLAIN: No, Sir. I cannot undertake to act on the hon. and gallant Member's proposal.

Lieut.-Colonel MURRAY: May we take it that the right hon. Gentleman is in favour of some such proposal as this?

ENGINEEEING AND SHIPBUILDING TRADES DISPUTE.

Mr. CLYNES: (by Private Notice) asked the Lord Privy Seal whether, in view of the breakdown in the protracted negotiations for the settlement of the dispute in the engineering and shipbuilding trades on the question of managerial functions and of the fact that shortly many additional thousands of workmen will be thrown out of employment with a consequent paralysis of industry, the Government will, in the public interest, now set up a Court of Inquiry under the Industrial Courts Act for the purpose of inquiring into the merits of the dispute?

Lieut.-Colonel Sir J. NORTON-GRIFFITHS: (by Private Notice) asked the Minister of Labour whether, he is in a position to make any statement as to the stage at which the engineering dispute has arrived?

Mr. CHAMBERLAIN: His Majesty's Government have been most anxious that this calamitous dispute should, if possible, be settled by the parties themselves without Government interference, but the Government have throughout kept in touch with all parties to the negotiations, and have more than once succeeded in bringing them together again when a final rupture seemed inevitable.
The special dispute on wages in the shipbuilding trade appears now to be in course of settlement, a basis of agreement having been arrived at for submission to the members of the unions concerned.
No agreement has been reached, however, in the engineering trades on the questions related to managerial functions, and an extension of the lookout seems inevitable. In these circumstances, the Minister of Labour, on behalf of His Majesty's Government, has appointed Sir William Mackenzie to be a Court of Inquiry under Part II of the Industrial Courts Act, so that the public may have an independent account of the character and limits of the question or questions in dispute. Sir William
Mackenzie will hold a preliminary meeting to-morrow morning, and the parties have been asked to send representatives to the meeting.

Mr. CLYNES: Do the Government contemplate taking any action to cause a resumption of work and a continuance of work during the course of the inquiry?

Mr. CHAMBERLAIN: There is no action which we can take with that object in view. That can only be done by the parties themselves getting together, and coming to some arrangement.

MILK SUPPLY (CONFERENCE).

Mr. HURD: (by Private Notice) asked the Minister of Agriculture if he will communicate to the House the results of the Milk Conference which he summoned on the eve of the Recess, and especially the details of the justification advanced by the distributors for the difference of 1s. per gallon between the price charged to the consumer and that paid to the farmer for his milk delivered at the London railway termini?

Sir A. BOSCAWEN: A statement giving the results of the Milk Conference was communicated to the Press, and I will have a copy printed in the OFFICIAL REPORT. AS the result of the conference was an agreement between the producers and distributors, I do not think it is desirable to issue any detailed statement of the arguments advanced by either side, but broadly the distributors maintained that having regard to the whole of the costs and risks involved in distribution they would be unable to carry on their business if the producer were paid a higher price than that offered.

Mr. HURD: Did the right hon. Gentleman not promise before the Recess that he would publish the essential facts elicited at the conference both as to distribution and production?

Sir A. BOSCAWEN: In the statement which I sent to the Press all the essential facts were mentioned. The real essential fact is that although the price of milk is not to be raised to the public, at all events to the end of June, the farmer, on the average, will get 2½d. per gallon more for the next six months than he would have done under the old agreement. I
do not say that that altogether meets the farmers' point of view, but that was the agreement which was reached, and I think we must all stand by it now.

Mr. HURD: As a matter of fact has not the right hon. Gentleman received representations from many farmers in his own constituency stating that they cannot produce milk at the price?

Sir A. BOSCAWEN: I have not had any representations in regard to this agreement by any of my constituents.

Mr. HURD: I have.

Following is the statement referred to by the Minister:
At a meeting held at the Ministry of Agriculture on Wednesday, 12th April, 1922, under the Chairmanship of the Minister of Agriculture, Sir Arthur Griffith Boscawen, the representatives of the producers and distributors announced that they had agreed to recommend to the organisations concerned that the price to be received by the producer for milk delivered into London from areas outside the Home Counties should be: April, 10d.; May and June, 9d.; July, 11d.; August and September, 1s. per gallon, which represents an average for the six months of 10½d. per gallon. The price to be paid for milk delivered to creameries within 100 miles by rail of London should be as follows: April, 9d.; May and June, 6d.; July, 7d.; August, 8d.; and September, 9d. per gallon, which represents an average for the six months of 7½d. per gallon.
Milk delivered to creameries at a greater distance than 100 miles by rail from London would be paid for at the same rate less the increased cost of railway transport to London.
It was agreed that the revised prices should be retrospective to 1st April and that those farmers who had already entered into contracts should receive the benefits accruing under the above arrangement.
The Minister understands that, in the case of certain distributors, contracts have been entered into to supply milk based on prices ruling previous to this agreed alteration, and he hopes that in such cases the holders of such contracts will agree to a revision in accordance with the altered terms to the producer.
The price to the consumer of 5d. a quart, which had previously been announced for the three months of April, May and June, will not be raised during that period.

FOREIGN OFFICE.

Colonel GRETTON: (by Private Notice) asked the Lord Privy Seal by whom the business of the Foreign Office is directed in the absence of the Secretary of State
and the Under-Secretary of State through illness? May I express my regret at the illness of these Gentlemen?

Mr. CHAMBERLAIN: I am sure that the House will sympathise with the expression of regret of my hon. and gallant Friend at the prolonged illness and suffering of the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs (Marquess Curzon), and at what I think I may call the slight illness of the Under-Secretary (Mr. Cecil Harmsworth).
The Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, although confined to his room, is attending to the business of the Department, and all papers are submitted to him in the usual way.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State is also carrying out his departmental duties, although, owing to the loss of his voice, ho is unable at present to answer questions in the House of Commons.

BUSINESS OF THE HOUSE.

Mr. CLYNES: May I ask the Leader of the House what business is to be taken next week?

Mr. CHAMBERLAIN: On Monday, the Chancellor of the Exchequer will open his Budget, and he hopes the House will give him the necessary taxing Resolution.
We propose to reserve one Resolution, as is customary—subject to the concurrence of the Chairman of Ways and Means—till Tuesday, for the continuation of the general discussion.
On Wednesday, it is hoped to take the Constabulary (Ireland) Bill (Second Reading), the Committee stage of the Financial Resolution on the Empire Settlement Bill, and other small Orders.
On Thursday, there will be Supply, and the business of the day will be the Post Office Vote.

Orders of the Day — SUPPLY.

[5TH ALLOTTED DAY.]

Considered in Committee.

[Mr. JAMES HOPE in the Chair.]

Orders of the Day — CIVIL SERVICES AND REVENUE DEPARTMENTS ESTIMATES, 1922–23.

CLASS IV.

BOARD OF EDUCATION.

Motion made, and Question proposed,
That a sum, not exceeding £27,900,000, be granted to His Majesty to complete the sum necessary to defray the Charge which will come in course of payment during the year ending on the 31st day of March, 1923, for the Salaries and Expenses of the Board of Education, and of the various Establishments connected therewith, including sundry Grants-in-Aid."—[Note: £17,000,000 has been voted on account.]

The PRESIDENT of the BOARD of EDUCATION (Mr. Herbert Fisher): The Estimate for the Board of Education, which I have the honour to introduce, differs from its predecessors in two main particulars: it is a rationed Estimate and it is a reduced Estimate. Last year we estimated our probable liabilities and asked Parliament for the wherewithal to meet them. This year we begin by determining the amount available, and we require the claims upon us to be adjusted thereto. We impose a limit on education authorities as to their expenditure in respect of elementary education and with respect to higher education, and we announce that expenditure in excess of those limits will not be recognised for grants. We do not discard the percentage grant system, but we subject it to limitation. The limits are for elementary education £62,450,000 and for higher education £13,000,000; a total of £75,450,000. Within the limits of the £62,450,000 there are certain interior limitations—of £12,000,000 for administrative and other expenditure and £3,400,000 for special services, including the School Medical Service, and a limit of £300,000 to the expenditure on the provision of meals which forms part of the special service of which I have been speaking so far.

Mr. MARRIOTT: Is that a minimum?

Mr. FISHER: It is a limit. So far I have been speaking of the expenditure of local authorities. Now I come to that part of the total expenditure for which provision is made by way of grants. As the Committee will see on reference to the White Paper which has been circulated, the amount provided for grants in aid of elementary education this year is £35,068,343 and for higher education £5,693,000. I pass on to the second feature, which distinguishes the present Estimate from the Estimate of last year, and that is there is a net decrease of £6,104,653, which results from a comparison of the total Estimate of £44,900,000 which I am now submitting with the Estimate of £51,014,665 for 1921–22. Let me invite the Committee to pause for a moment to consider this reduction of £6,100,000. To many Members of the Committee so large a drop in the Education Estimate may give rise to feelings of anxiety, because while there is a very strong and fully justified desire, not only in this Committee, but in the country at large, to effect economy in every branch of public expenditure, there is at the same time a strong feeling here and elsewhere that, in the case of a reproductive social service like education, the pruning of expenditure must not be carried to such a point as to endanger the sap and life of the plant. Let us examine for a moment this figure of £6,100,000. It will be observed in the first place that £1,205,683 of this reduction is due to the diminution of a service resulting from the War. It is due to the fact that many of the students who have been undergoing a course of instruction at the universities and other places, with the aid of grants from the Board, have now terminated their course, and have gone out into the world. This, then, is a reduction which will have no prejudicial effect on the education which is given to the children in our schools. Then the Committee will observe that £2,300,575 of the total reduction in this estimate, is represented by the Appropriation-in-Aid and will be derived, if Parliamentary sanction be obtained—as the matter will need legislation—by a contribution from the secondary and elementary teachers in respect of their pensions. I do not propose to enlarge upon this part
of the Estimate here. The matter will come up for consideration when the proposals of the Government are laid before Parliament, and that will be the most convenient opportunity for discussing the subject. I will merely draw the attention of the Committee to the fact that £3,500,000 of the total saving of £6,000,000 is represented by savings which will have no effect in abridging the educational facilities enjoyed by children, or in diminishing the efficiency of the public service of education.
There remains some £2,500,000 of difference between this year's Estimate and last year's, and that is the reduction which will principally concern those who have the educational interests of the country at heart, though I presume that to the Chancellor of the Exchequer all savings, from whatever quarter they may be derived, are equally refreshing. I can understand that some Members of the Committee, who are engaged in the task of administering our Education Acts in county or borough councils, may feel some anxiety even at, this reduced figure. They may say that the bodies whom they serve have entered into all kinds of commitments—they have contracts with their teachers, with their inspectors, and with builders, and furthermore, during the last year, they have engaged on a course of stringent economy: and they ask, that being so, whether they will be able to bring their expenditure within the total desired without making sacrifices which they would greatly regret? I think I am able to dispel apprehension on this score. My view is that most of the economies required to keep the expenditure of the local education authorities within the totals prescribed in this Estimate have already been made or are being made. The fact is that the Board have been in a position to make a surrender of nearly £3,000,000 on last year's Vote. How was this large saving effected? It was the direct consequence of the Circulars of December, 1920, and January, 1021, which were issued by the Board to local authorities throughout the country, enjoining upon them the necessity of adjusting their expenditure to the financial stringency of the time. To this call the local authorities so responded that, instead of spending over £51,000,000 last year, the Board's expenditure barely exceeded £48,000,000.
I am bound to admit that it has not been a pleasant task, either for the Board or the local authorities, to make these economies. We have been compelled to postpone the overtaking of many of the War arrears in building and repairs which have been accumulating for the last, seven years, and also we have been compelled to forego many developments which in happier times we should have been glad to have seen undertaken. But the Committee must not suppose that, in enjoining these economies, the Board advocated a blind or inconsiderate policy of retrenchment. We were careful to point out to the local authorities that the schools were not to fall below a tolerable standard of efficiency, particularly in respect of adequacy of accommodation, staffing, and attention to the physical condition of the children. Some of the arrears which have been accumulating during the War in staffing, repairs and equipment were to be overtaken, and some provision was to be made for actual and prospective growth in the ordinary services of education; and it is worth adding that, although nearly £3,000,000 was saved on the Estimate, our expenditure last year was nevertheless £2,500,000 higher than in the previous year. So much, then, for this economy of £6,100,000. I hope 1 have said enough to reassure those who are engaged in the task of local administration that they should be able to keep within the totals fixed in this Estimate without serious loss to the educational system for the local administration of which they are responsible, and I trust that in the course of the next month I may be able to give them more exact information as to the position in which they stand.
And now may I say a few words with respect to the larger scheme of economy which was recommended to the Government by the Committee on National Expenditure which sat under the chairmanship of Sir Eric Geddes. It is perfectly true that my right hon. Friend the Chancellor of the Exchequer explained to the House on a previous occasion the reason why the Government found itself unable to accept most of those recommendations, but I am in receipt of so many communications which are obviously drafted under the impression that all the recommendations of the Geddes Committee have in effect been accepted, that I think I may,
perhaps, occupy a little of the time of the Committee in explaining, perhaps more fully than the Chancellor of the Exchequer did, the reasons which induced the Government not to accept some of those recommendations. As the Committee will remember, that distinguished body of business men recommended a reduction in the expenditure on education amounting, roughly, to £16,000,000 for England and Wales, and £18,000,000 for the United Kingdom; and they proposed to effect this result partly by the exclusion of children under six from schools, partly by enlarging the powers of the Board to close small schools, partly by the transference of a considerable sum from the taxes to the rates, partly by a great reduction in teaching costs—to be arrived at either by a cut in salaries or by a wholesale dismissal of teachers, or a combination of both methods—and partly by requiring a contribution to the teachers' pensions. There were other minor reductions which we need hardly consider in this large context.
After careful consideration the Government came to the conclusion that it could not accept the suggestion that children under six should be excluded from the schools. It may be true that the amount of formal instruction which a child of these tender years can gain from school teaching is slight. It may be true that any little instructional advantage which a child may derive from entering upon school life at the age of five, when compared with the child who enters a year later, tends to become less and less apparent every year, and finally vanishes altogether. All this may be true, and yet at the same time, having regard to the character of our urban population and to the housing conditions in our large towns, there is an overwhelming case for securing to every child over five years the right to a clean place in a clean school. I agree that the home is a better place than the school for a little child, but one room makes a poor home, and when the mother goes out to work she does not leave much homeliness behind. According to the census of 1911, the number occupying one-room tenements was over 254,000, there were over 57,000 families of three or more persons living in one room, over 135,000 families of five or more in two rooms, and over
130,000 of seven or more in three rooms. I do not imagine that the housing conditions are better in this respect now than they were in 1911. The Government then came to the conclusion that it could not accept this recommendation, but at the same time we are of opinion that parents should have the option of keeping their children at home until the age of six. In so far as that option is exercised, there is reason to expect that economies will result.
Then I come to the proposal of the Geddes Committee to strengthen the hands of the Board in procuring the closure of small schools. There is a great deal to be said for that suggestion. There is very little doubt that were we able to carry out a judicious policy of amalgamation it would result in improved education for the children and in saving to the taxpayer and the ratepayer. There are some parts where small country schools have been closed and the children have been brought to a neighbouring school by motor car and there has been a considerable saving and also considerable improvement in education, and that process has been carried on to a very considerable extent in some States of America with advantages both economical and educational. On the other hand, there are very serious difficulties in the way. There is first of all the sentimental objection which is always raised when a proposal is made to close a small school. People get attached to the small school. They do not like to see it go. It is a centre, of life, and whenever I take any steps to close a small school, however inefficient, however deplorable, I am always overwhelmed with protests from the neighbourhood. Then again there is the geographical difficulty which in some cases is considerable. Lastly, and this is much the most formidable difficulty, there is the denominational obstacle. For these reasons we have felt it is impossible to accept this proposal. Neither could we accede to the suggestion that the grant system should be so altered as to transfer the sum of £3,000,000 from the taxes to the rates. The rates press more hardly than the taxes.
There remain, then, two large proposals for economy—a reduction of teaching cost, either through the dismissal of teachers or a cut in salaries or a combina-
tion of both methods and a contribution to pensions. The Government does not deal directly with the teachers, but it has an engagement with the local education authorities, who are the employers of the teachers, and it has in effect said to them, "If you are prepared to pay the teachers salaries upon the scale allocated to your respective districts by the Burnham Committee we will recognise that expenditure for grant subject always to the conditions and stipulations imposed by the Board when the scales were accepted," and on the faith of that undertaking local authorities have made contracts with their teachers. The contract of London with its teachers runs till 1923, the contracts of other authorities till 1925, and the Government, in view of these circumstances, is precluded from going back upon its decision so recently taken to pay grants on these scales. Nor would it be possible to accept the suggestion of the Committee to insist on an average standard of 50 pupils to a class, partly because of the large number of small schools in the country and partly because the structural conditions of many schools are such that to insist on such a rule as this would necessarily involve classes of a size so unwieldy in other schools as to sacrifice the educational interests of the children with the consequent waste of the money expended on them. I do not deny that some economy can be effected in staffing, and this in three directions, firstly if the head teacher of every school of 250 and under is made responsible for the teaching of a class, secondly by a revision of the staffing in certain areas where it is upon a somewhat lavish scale, and thirdly if the practice of staffing infant departments in urban areas by certificated and uncertificated teachers is modified. As regards the first method, I think there are educational as well as financial advantages in establishing a more uniform rule of practice. In some areas the head teacher takes a full share of teaching. In others the head teachers do too little, and this is bad both for them and for the schools, even making full allowance for the miscellaneous administrative duties which they have to perform. When we consider that, in general, the best teachers or the better teachers are promoted to be the head teachers, it is a deplorable waste of educational power
that a head teacher should, on becoming head teacher, withdraw from teaching. It would be a considerable saving of money and of real educational advantage if the head teachers continued to teach.
With regard to the second method, namely, reducing the staff in those areas—there are not many—where it is on a somewhat lavish scale. I understand that some apprehension is felt as to the consequence of the review of school staffs which authorities are undertaking in those areas. Teachers fear that if they lose one post they will be unable to obtain another. I know that teachers are not very mobile. Many naturally prefer to work in towns or near their homes, and in areas to which they are accustomed. It is a fact however that at the present time there are considerable numbers of vacant posts, especially in county areas. I do not, therefore, apprehend that much hardship will result from these measures, and I anticipate some financial saving from them. With regard to the third method, the staffing of infant departments. I am the last person to undervalue the advantage of training for teachers. Other things being equal, a trained teacher is always better than an untrained teacher. I should always hope that the infant department of a large elementary school would be under the direction of a trained teacher, but it is not necessary, certainly not in these times of grave financial stringency, that every assistant in an infants' department should be a trained teacher or a certificated teacher as in London, or even an uncertificated teacher. I believe there is room for economy in this quarter by staffing classes of children under six years with women chosen with regard to their personal suitability and aptitude for the work than to academical qualifications, and that if judiciously carried out and watched this method will not be found to be injurious to the interests of the children. So much for the savings recommended by the Geddes Committee which the Government have felt themselves unable to adopt.
Now let me pass to a brief review of the sub-heads of the Board's Vote. The first two sub-heads refer to a branch of educational expenditure on which I should like to dwell for a few moments in view of the misconception which appears to exist about it. I am often told
that expenditure on education to-day is not grudged of itself, but that there is plenty of room for large savings in the money spent on Whitehall and on useless and unnecessary inspectors. There is a great deal of misconception on this point. For instance, not many weeks ago a distinguished headmaster wrote seriously to the "Times" suggesting that there might now be about a thousand clerks at the Board of Education checking school registers, at a cost of £200,000, and probably even double that sum, and he strongly recommended the abolition of this. The facts are that the full time of 12 clerks is devoted to this tedious but necessary process, at a total cost in salaries of £3,000. The process is necessary because as some grants depend upon unite of attendance it is obviously necessary to check these units of attendance in order that we should not pay less or more than the Regulations lay down. The headquarters' staff of the Board at Whitehall is not more than the work requires. The total cost of the Board's administration and inspection amounts to only 1.87 per cent. of its total expenditure. That is a very reasonable business proposition. The total expenditure is actually £7,000 below the figure recommended by the Geddes Committee, and the Geddes Committee had no extravagant views in favour of the Board and its works. It is quite true that if you take the numbers of the Board's headquarters' staff for the current year there is an addition of three when compared with the numbers of last year. That increase is in the lower grades, and is due to the additional staff required for the administration of the School Teachers (Superannuation) Act, 1918. The higher staff of the Board shows a reduction, and a further reduction is in contemplation. If the arrangements at Whitehall are to be criticised, then it must be admitted that there is not quite enough first-class work for the number of first-class men in the office, and for that reason I am contemplating a gradual reduction of the higher administrative staff, and that will result in economy.
I would like to ask the Committee to consider the magnitude and complexity of the task which the Board bas to undertake. It has to deal in the first place with 317 Local Education Authorities. These Authorities are vigorous and active each with their own local problems and
difficulties, which have to be considered in relation to the central policy of the Government. Though the Board devolves as much as it can upon its inspectors resident in the districts, and though much correspondence is saved in that way, enough remains to make very great demands upon the headquarters' staff. We have to deal with 20,000 public elementary schools with nearly 6,000,000 children on the registers, with over 1,200 secondary schools containing more than 360,000 pupils; with technical and evening schools, schools of art, university tutorial classes, continuation schools, etc., over 5,000 in number with nearly 1,000,000 students; and with over 100 training colleges and departments for teachers, with about 14,000 students in training. There is also a great deal of work in connection with charitable trusts for educational purposes, with teachers' pensions, with grants for the higher education of ex-service students, with the great and growing school medical service, with special schools for the blind, the deaf, and the physically and mentally defective. We have also to administer the Victoria and Albert Museums and the Royal College of Art. When all this is taken into account, I do not think that it can really be urged that the staff at headquarters is in any way excessive, or that the money spent on the Central Department's administration and inspection is wasted.
4.0 P.M.
Before I leave this subject, let me add one word on the Inspectorate. It is very fashionable to blame the Inspectorate. The object of the Inspectorate is to provide the Board of Education with eyes and ears, to enable the President of the Board to come down to this House and to give an account of his stewardship, and, so long as Parliament votes money in aid of education, it is necessary that there should be a staff of inspectors to see that the money is properly and effectively spent and that the country is getting value for it. It certainly affords no assistance to the cause of economy to disparage the invaluable work which the Inspectorate are performing throughout the country. What is the case with regard to the Inspectorate? The paper establishment of the Inspectorate is the same as last year—413. There will probably be a saving of about 20 posts as the result of not filling 20 of the 40 vacancies which now exist. If these vacancies are
left unfilled, the numbers will be brought down very nearly to the 1914 level. There will be 393 as compared with 385, and that in spite of the very great growth of the Board's work. I think every member of the Committee will agree with me in saying that it is not an extravagant demand to expect that the President of the Board should receive a report on every elementary school once in three years. Our Inspectorate is based upon the principle that we should be able to have a report once in three years, but I regret to say that it is very difficult to get even a triennial report on every elementary school. I think that will give the Committee, more clearly than any other figure that I can supply, a very just idea of the difficulty which confronts the Board in educational inspection. Our Inspectorate, so far from being overstaffed, is in my view under-staffed. I should be very glad if financial conditions did permit some slight increase in this respect.

Sir HENRY CRAIK: Now that inspection is not annual and not individually, as it used to be, how is it necessary to have a very much larger Inspectorate?

Mr. FISHER: I am not asking for a very much larger inspectorate. I said that a slight addition would enable us to get a report on every elementary school once in three years.

Sir H. CRAIK: Why is it necessary to have a larger inspectorate now than when inspection in the school was every year and when every individual pupil was examined?

Mr. FISHER: The work has enormously increased.

Sir PHILIP MAGNUS: The right hon. Gentleman says that inspection of the elementary school takes place once in three years. How many similar inspections are made by the local authority?

Mr. FISHER: I am afraid that I have not made myself quite understood. I did not mean to say that the schools were visited only once in three years, but that we got a report only once in three years. Of course, if you are going to get an adequate report, you want the inspector to make several visits to the school. The hon. Baronet the Member for London University (Sir P. Magnus) has raised the question of overlapping, and that no doubt is an important question. We have
our own inspectors, and the local education authorities have their inspectors-We endeavour so far as we can to avoid overlapping. It is quite clear that we must have our inspectors, and it is also quite clear that the local education authorities must have some means of knowing what teachers deserve promotion and what teachers do not deserve promotion, because it is the local authority who promotes. Therefore, they must have people whom they can send into the school and who can report to them as to the progress of the school. But I think I may say that we have been successful in avoiding overlapping to a very great extent. It is a matter which is engaging my most careful attention, and I can assure the hon. Baronet that everything will be done to avoid any waste in that particular.

Mr. HURD: What does the right hon. Gentleman mean by "overlapping"? Does he mean that the county inspector and the Whitehall inspector shall not have the same subject under review in the same school?

Mr. FISHER: Yes, I mean that, and I also mean this. Most of the work done by the local inspectors is not inspection in the educational sense of the term. The inspectors of the London County Council are very much on the lines of the Board's inspectors, and consequently we have car-lied out very great economies in our own inspectorate in London in order not to overlap with the London County Council inspection. I will pass now from that subject to Sub-head C of the Board's Vote. The elementary school is the cornerstone of our educational system, and an analysis of the Estimates shows that by far the largest part of the cost of the system of public education is occasioned by the requirements of our elementary schools. It will be seen by reference to the White Paper that the grants to local education authorities for elementary education amount to £34,983,693, and that grants to bodies other than local education authorities amount to £84,650, and that the public moneys, whether derived from the rates or taxes, available for elementary education, are expended by the local education authorities under four heads, namely, teachers' salaries, loan charges, administration and other expenditure, and special services.
About 70 per cent, of the total cost of education is accounted for by the salaries
of teachers, and these salaries will be increased owing to the operation of the Burnham scales in the current financial year. The assumed total for 1922–23 exceeds the local education authorities revised Estimates for 1921–22 by £1,232,000. I will pause for a moment on this figure, because it will seem to many Members to be an anomaly that, while everybody else is coming down in wages, teachers should be going up. In many parts of the country this anomaly is commented upon with some severity, and it is argued that the salaries of teachers should fall with the fall of prices. That is a point which is also taken by the Committee on National Expenditure. I will not stop to consider whether the teachers would have strengthened their claim upon public sympathy by offering to forgo their increments under the Burnham scales during this grave period of financial difficulty. I will merely ask hon. Members who may be inclined to take a censorious view to bear in mind four facts. First of all, the teachers were greatly underpaid before the War; secondly, during the early years of the War they refrained from pressing any claim for increased salaries through patriotic scruples; thirdly, they are generally required to submit to a three years' carry-over before they reach their correct position on the allocated scale; and, lastly, the scales of salaries will come up for revision, in the case of London in 1923, and for the rest of the country in 1925. If it be assumed that the scales are liberal and that the Burnham Committees, working in an atmosphere of high prices and taking into account, as I think they were bound to do, the rate of remuneration which was then being received by skilled labour in every department of the industrial field, were inclined to treat the teachers generously, it must also be remembered how important it was at that time, when there was great unrest all over the labour world, to bring peace into the elementary schools by a settlement, agreed on the one hand by the teachers and on the other hand by their employers, the local education authorities, which would have the effect of giving teachers a greater measure of comfort and independence than they had hitherto enjoyed.
I would like to take this opportunity of explaining that the Burnham Committees
were in no sense Government Committees or Committees of the Board of Education. Though the Board helped them so far as they were able by supplying them with facts, that help, as Lord Burnham has explicitly stated, in no way committed the Board to accept the Committees' recommendations. I think the establishment of these Committees, whatever criticisms Members may be inclined to pass upon their work, was in itself a good step. I have always thought that, although our system of local government is itself admirable, it is lacking in coherence, and, when a national service is locally administered by 317 separate authorities, the consequences of incoherence may be serious. I would like the Committee to realise what the situation was when these Committees were set up. There was great unrest all over the labour world. There was great unrest in the elementary schools. There were returned officers—because the elementary schools sent 21,000 teachers into the Army, many of whom, most of whom in fact, I believe, got commissions—finding it extremely difficult to live on their pay. There was great pressure on the local authorities to advance the pay of teachers, and the pay was being raised in a most sporadic, erratic, and irregular way in different parts of the country. In some parts of the country teachers were receiving large additions to their salaries, and in other parts of the country nothing was being done. The divergencies between one part of the country and another were becoming greater and greater, with the result that they dislocated proportionately the educational system. It seemed to me then that the right thing to do was to try to get a settlement of this national question of salaries by bringing the representatives of the local education authorities into contact with the representatives of the teachers to see if they could not hammer out an orderly and progressive solution of the salary problem. I know that their work was very laborious and very exacting, and I am grateful to them and their distinguished chairman.
I pass to the loan charges, the second item of expenditure on elementary education. Here there has been a small increase of £146,000, but this is no more than can be justified by a partial attempt to overtake the large mass of arrears which accumulated owing to the suspen-
sion of all building during the War. It will be remembered that the Commission on National Expenditure realised that no reduction could be expected in this particular field of educational expenditure. Practically speaking, the loan charges have remained unchanged since 1914, but it is fair to remind the Committee that apart from the ordinary demands on all secondary and elementary schools there are heavy arrears of building work which must be dealt with very soon. There are far too many school buildings in the country which are inconvenient and quite unsuitable for their purposes. It is not fair to compel children to attend in them or to ask teachers to work in them, and at the earliest possible moment they must be repaired or replaced.

Sir F. BANBURY: Where are we to get the money from?

Mr. FISHER: This evil is not confined to voluntary schools, but it is conspicuous among voluntary schools. The managers cannot raise funds to improve them, and the local authorities cannot spend money on improving them. I do not underrate the value of the work which is done in the voluntary schools, or the services which they have rendered or are rendering, and I appreciate the grounds on which many people attach great importance to their continuance. But the dual system is up against very hard facts, and unless some way can be found of effecting a, reasonable settlement of the ancient controversies which have clustered around it we shall find ourselves in a position of intolerable embarrassment before many years are over. I ventured to make a tentative suggestion for a settlement by agreement. It was merely a suggestion for the purpose of encouraging discussion. I am bound to say that I have not been very much encouraged by the reception with which that suggestion met.

The CHAIRMAN: I must remind the right hon. Gentleman that it would not be in order on this Vote to discuss proposed legislation or suggested legislation. Of course, an allusion would not be out of order.

Mr. FISHER: I bow to your ruling. I merely wished to emphasise the fact that if an agreement upon the religious question in the schools, cannot be arrived at I feel that circumstances will in a few
years compel a solution. I was not intending to suggest legislation.
The expenditure on special services which will be recognised for grant to the extent of 50 per cent, of that expenditure is to be limited to £3,400,000, which is less by £754,000 than the local education authorities' revised Estimates, and this reduction will be accounted for chiefly by a diminution of £730,000 in the provision of meals, which in 1921–22 reached the abnormal figure of £1,030,000. It is no part of the Government policy to curtail any expenditure which may really be necessary to preserve our child population in bodily health. That would be the worst and most ruinous form of waste, and we do not suggest it. But it is our duty to realise that so vast an expansion of the eleemosynary treatment of school children as we have witnessed recently is not, correctly speaking, an educational function, the cost of which should fall upon the education rate or upon the vote of the Board, and so we propose to limit the sum chargeable on the Vote in respect of the provision of meals to £150,000, which is more than sufficient to meet the normal claim in a normal year. Abnormal claims arising from great waves of unemployment which unfortunately we have had in the past should be met out of other funds. Though I fully admit that the work of arranging school meals may be carried on as before by the local educational authorities in the schools, so far as the normal staff enable them to cope with it, yet the truth is that the inspectors of the Board of Education are not trained to check this kind of expenditure. They are trained for a very different kind of work, and I hope the Committee will agree in the view that it is right to relieve the Board's Vote of Expenditure which it cannot control adequately, and which is not germane to the primary purpose of the Education Vote or of the Education rate.
I now come to the medical service proper. In view of the great importance of the school medical service, and its admirable work, I should be very sorry to see any damaging economy either in the sphere of medical inspection or in the treatment or management of our special schools. When I remind the Committee of the fact that the school medical service inspects over 2,500,000 children every year, while the attendance of the
children at our clinics runs to many millions annually, and the cost to the Exchequer of all this work amounts to about 2s. 6d. per head of the 6,000,000 children in average attendance at public elementary schools, I hope that it will not be regarded as an extravagant service.

Mr. HURD: It is plus the local expenditure.

Mr. FISHER: As the Committee knows, it has increased in cost, but it has also increased in the volume of its work. I am sorry that I cannot give the Committee complete figures for the country, but I have figures for 24 areas, including the London area, and these, I think, will be instructive. If we compare the number of attendances of children at school clinics in these 24 areas for the years 1914 and 1920, we find that in 1914 the attendance was a little over 700,000, and in 1920 a little over 3,000,000. This will give the Committee a measure of the great increase of work done by this branch of the education service, and it is not too much to say that, as a result of its work, there have been an improvement in the cleanliness of school children amounting almost to a revolution, and a great and progressive improvement in regard to dental defects and defects of vision, while hundreds of thousands of children have had their physique and powers of resisting disease improved, with the result that in the case of some 500,000 children vast masses of subsequent disablement, sickness, and mortality have been prevented. Therefore I am happy to think that it will be possible for the local education authorities to keep within the expenditure which will be recognised for grants without any real injury to the service. There is, as I have said, a limitation of £3,400,000 on the expenditure for special services.

Dr. ADDISON: Will that limitation be by a decrease of this expenditure?

Mr. FISHER: Most of the reduction will be in the cost of feeding in schools. Page 4 of the memorandum shows that there is a decrease of £754,000 in respect of special services, and page 5 shows that £730,000 of that is accounted for by a reduction in the recognised expenditure for school feeding. That leaves £24,000
of economy to be effected in the other branches of these services.

Captain W. BENN: Is there any guarantee as to any other source from which the money for school feeding may be forthcoming if it should be necessary?

Mr. FISHER: The hon. and gallant Gentleman may be assured that the children will be fed if it is necessary.

Mr. T. THOMSON: From what source?

Mr. FISHER: They can be fed by the boards of guardians if there is no other source.

Dr. ADDISON: Do I understand my right hon. Friend to say that the teachers have recommended for feeding children who should not be fed?

Mr. FISHER: No, I do not in the least imply that. What I do imply is that the Board have no adequate control over this expenditure. For that reason it is very difficult for me to assume responsibility. It is not the work of our inspectors. Medical inspection is done by medical men.
I now pass to the special schools. I do not say that there is no field for economy here. I am carefully examining the matter, and the Board will shortly publish revised regulations which will have the effect of facilitating a reduction in the cost of schools for defectives, without lessening the number of children who benefit from this form of care and treatment. In this matter I place the schools for the blind and deaf in a special category.

Mr. FOOT: And open-air schools?

Mr. FISHER: I am dealing now with the blind and the deaf. I put these schools in a very special category. It is true that the schools are very costly. The average cost per unit of the blind school is about £80 per child. That is very high. I do not think that we can expect much diminution in the expense of these schools—though I am looking into the matter carefully—having regard to the minute and individual attention on the part of highly trained teachers which is essential to their effective working. Some of the most beautiful teaching work that is done anywhere is the teaching in these schools. The effects which the highly trained teachers get with the blind and the deaf seem almost miraculous. I
would recommend anyone who is sceptical of the value of education to go into one of these schools and to see the marvellous results which are produced. I should, therefore, be very sorry to see any damaging reduction of their work.

Lord H. CAVENDISH-BENTINCK: Has the right hon. Gentleman not informed the local education authorities that they cannot increase their expenditure on the blind?

The CHAIRMAN: I must deprecate these continual interrogations.

Mr. FISHER: I did issue a warning to local education authorities that they must in effect await the Estimates. I did not wish them to plunge into new expenditure without seeing where they were. As I have said, I place the schools of the blind and deaf in a very special category. There is perhaps no form of education which yields so definite a return in happiness and wage-earning independence. In the other special schools, very important no doubt, the staff can be arranged on a more economical basis than hitherto. I know that in many quarters of the House there is great and legitimate sympathy for the admirable work which is done in these special schools, and a great desire not to see that work crippled or reduced. But let me remind the Committee of two things. First of all, the supply of these schools is at present inadequate to the needs of the community. We have not covered all the children who ought to be covered by these schools, and one of the great obstacles which has impeded the development of these schools has been their great expense. If we can find means now of abridging the normal expenditure of these schools we should no doubt be able to increase the sphere of their operations when financial circumstances permit.
I pass to the fourth head under which expenditure on elementary education is arranged—administration and other expenditure. We propose to limit the local authorities to £12,000,000, contrasted with their revised Estimates for 1921–22 of £13,213,000. The expenditure on local administration naturally rose with the devaluation of money. Everything became more expensive—school furniture, books, note-books and everything which the authorities have to use. At one time n copy-book which ordinarily costs a
1d. could only be obtained for 7d. The authorities will be assisted in bringing their expenditure within the total named by the fall of prices, and as this form of expenditure attracts only a 20 per cent, grant from the Board, this reduction will involve the least disturbance of the finances of local authorities.
I now pass to that part of the Estimate which affects higher education. The Committee will note that the Hoard assume a total expenditure of £13,000,000 by local education authorities for 1922–23, or £1,000,000 less than the assumed figure upon which the Board based its Estimate of last year. I wish to comment for a moment on this figure of £13,000,000. It is about £2,000,000 more than the estimated total of the expenditure in 1920–21, and if the Committee will look at the figure on page 5 of the Memorandum they will see that this £2,000,000 is accounted for, as regards £1,000,000 by an increase in the cost of secondary education, and as regards £600,000 by an increase in respect of technical education. That is where the great increases are found.
In accounting for these increases we have to take into account the fact that the work has increased—more schools, more children in the schools, longer school life of the children—and also the fact that the salaries of the teachers have been increased. Just as the Burnham scales have had considerable effect in the sphere of elementary education, so they have exercised a parallel effect in the sphere of secondary education. The Committee on National Expenditure commented on the rapid growth in expenditure on higher education. They were doubtful whether the money was being spent to advantage and whether young people were receiving education which was suited to their capacities. I note that those doubts are shared by some hon. Members. I am aware that it is very necessary to watch narrowly the quality of the entrants into our secondary schools, and I am now considering whether more system cannot be introduced into the arrangements for selecting children for admission to secondary schools. I quite agree that it is a waste of public money to give a secondary education to a boy or girl who cannot profit by it. But I wish to make one observation. There is no financial economy involved in a closer
examination of the intellectual claims of children desirous of profiting by our secondary education, because we could fill our secondary schools over and over again with children who are quite able to profit by secondary education up to the age of 16. Our supply of secondary school places is far short of the effective demand and short of the standard which is required in the most civilised and advanced countries in the world.
Although I am entirely in agreement with the view that, having regard to the existing circumstances, we must closely and narrowly watch the claims of entrants into our secondary schools, I cannot promise that any saving will result from the process. I agree, however, that it is possible and legitimate in some areas and in some schools to require an increased contribution to the cost of secondary education by way of fees. I do not wish to be too sanguine on this point. Many of the local authorities have already raised their fees, and many of them, I am persuaded, have already reached the limit of what parents can pay. Let me remind the Committee of this fact. The middle classes in this country pay the education rate like everybody else, and the poorer members of the middle classes feel the burden of the education rate perhaps more than any class in the community. The only way in which they can get a direct return for their education rate is from the cheap education—it is a cheap and excellent education—which is afforded by our newer type of secondary schools. I observe that the Committee on National Expenditure commented on the fact that some well-known secondary schools, such as Bedford and Berkhampsted, have come upon the grant list, and the Committee raised the question whether it was right that such schools should come on the grant list. I put myself into communication with those schools in order to ascertain the sources from which their scholars were drawn. I found that a very large number were the children of naval and military officers, not at all a wealthy class, but a class which certainly deserves to obtain the advantages of cheap education for its children; and I felt that we were justified in helping those schools. Otherwise they would have entirely changed their character seeing that they would
have had to raise their fees to an extent which would have made them unavailable for their particular localities and for the particular classes which they were serving. I have examined very carefully the proposal of the Geddes Committee that the proportion of free placers in secondary schools should not exceed 25 per cent., but to lay down such a rule as that would be to ignore the differing economic structure and characteristics of different regions. A proportion which is fair and reasonable in Middlesex or Bournemouth may be quite inadequate in South Wales or Durham, but I agree that for the present the general proportion between free placers and fee-paying students should not be disturbed. We ought to remember that a large number of the ablest children in our secondary schools come up from the elementary schools with a free place, and a reduction in the number of free placers now available in any part of the country would create a deep and natural sense of dissatisfaction, would weaken the schools intellectually, and ultimately weaken the Universities and reduce the return which the nation expects in the form of trained ability for its expenditure of public funds on Higher Education.
I have occupied a long time, and I must apologise to the Committee, but we get very few opportunities of discussing educational subjects, and before I leave these Estimates, I will meet one criticism which has been made, not I think in this House, but outside. It is sometimes said: This Government has done a great deal in the way of subsidising public education. No Government has done so much or has approached it in liberality, but has it improved public education? Has it affected in any way the content of our education? Has there been any attempt to re-think the curricula of our schools, to introduce new studies and new methods in place of studies and methods which are obsolete, or has the Government merely given us a more expensive education? I think it is quite reasonable that this question should be asked, but I have no difficulty in meeting the implied criticism. Let me remind the Committee in the first place that a great deal of attention is given by the Board of Education every year, every month, every week, and every day to the
character of the instruction given in our schools and in the methods of the teachers. The schools are subject to constant inspection frequently giving rise to fruitful suggestions. It is quite true that there have been no melodramatic announcements of changes of educational policy. I remember that after the War, the Prussian Minister of Education announced in a circular that henceforward Prussian children were to be trained in systematic amiability towards foreign countries. It must not be supposed, however, that because we have made no revolutionary changes we have made no changes at all. The short course for teachers, the introduction on a far more extensive scale of practical training in the later stages of elementary school life, the advanced courses in secondary schools which are being very carefully planned and are very largely taken—all these steps have affected and are affecting the content and methods of our education. Apart from that, we have, with the help of four expert Committees—two of them appointed before I came into office in the time of my predecessor. Lord Crewe—we have with the help of these four expert Committees surveyed a great part of the field of English education, science, modern languages, classics and English. We have got together a large body of Valuable doctrine, which is now available for practical use in each of these four great subjects of educational work. At the present moment the Board is engaged in correcting the conclusions and recommendations of these four Committees with the view of giving to them as wide an influence as they deserve to have, in the teaching of our elementary and secondary schools.
Then I am met with the opposite criticism that there has been too much innovation; that we are trying to do too many things, to teach the children too many subjects, and that the work of the schools is not as thorough as it used to be in the good old days. I am sure the Committee will realise that it is very difficult to make confident generalisations on the point of thoroughness because of the variations that exist as between school and school, teacher and teacher, region and region. I can only put before the Committee what the aim of the Board has been in the last five years since I have been connected with it. Our aim has
been on the one hand to simplify the instruction in the elementary schools up to the age of 11 plus, in order to enable the children to obtain a firmer grip on what are popularly known as "the three R's," and at a later stage of elementary school life to introduce a larger volume of practical instruction—handiwork and the like. Any Member of the Committee who may like to acquaint himself with the character of the experiments which have recently been made to extend the scope and interest of elementary school life in its later stages might profitably consult the Board's report on the Keeping of Livestock in Elementary Schools which will shortly be published.

Sir F. BANBURY: The keeping of what?

Mr. FISHER: Of livestock in schools in country districts, I can assure the Committee there are some country districts where this has done extremely well. In Gloucestershire, for instance, very largely, I believe, at the instance of Lord Bledisloe, who has interested himself greatly in this matter, very large numbers of schools have got gardens, and we are informed that this practical work in gardening and the keeping of livestock has had a very refreshing influence on every part of the school work, including arithmetic and English composition. I think also any member of the Committee who may be interested in this side of our work would do well to consult the Board's memoranda on Promotion in Elementary Schools in London, published in 1919. So far, then, from it being true that the Board in the last five years has attempted to give an exclusively literary education leading up to the university, to every child in the country, the policy has been, just the opposite. We have endeavoured, in every way, to strengthen practical education. We realise, as I suppose every sensible man and woman who has given attention to the subject does, that education is not imparted only through the reading of books, and our object has been to give to the children in the elementary schools, not a course of vocational education, which would be quite improper, but such a training of the hand and eye as is most likely to engage their interest, sharpen their curiosity, quicken their sense of beauty and form, and give them a grasp of some few elementary
scientific principles in relation to practical life.
The judgment of any single individual, however large his experience may be, on the general progress of education in the country is of very little value, but we have the, means at the Board of Education of examining a great body of evidence collected from all parts of the country. We have the great advantage of the wide and long experience of our inspectors who are in close contact with the work of the schools, and I can say confidently that the result of the evidence placed before us is to show that we have made steady and consistent progress, that the teachers are better equipped for their work, that the curriculum is more, interesting to the children, and that, with the multiplication of scholarships and the widening of the avenue leading to higher education, the current of intellectual interest and intellectual ambition runs much more strongly and vivaciously than ever before in the history of this country.
I will give the Committee a little incident—one in many—which came to my notice not long ago. I happened to be in a great industrial town in the North and I went into a voluntary day continuation school. The boys were doing chemistry—not an inappropriate subject— and I said to the teacher, "Do many of your boys travel long distances to attend this school?" He said, "Some of them do," and, pointing out a small lad, he added, "That boy has come a long distance and is a very sharp lad." I said to the boy, "When did you get up this morning?" and he said, rather shamefacedly, "Well, sir, I got up at half-past six, but I overslept myself." I asked him then, "When do you get up generally?" He said, "I get up at 4 o'clock generally, and I bicycle 30 miles every day to attend school." This, it may be remembered, was a purely voluntary school, and the boy was not obliged to come to school. That gave me an intimation of the kind of spirit that exists, not. I am afraid, universally or even generally, but very largely in the North of England.

Sir F. BANBURY: Did the right hon. Gentleman believe all that?

5.0 P.M.

Mr. FISHER: I have had more experience of the young than the right hon.
Baronet. I am afraid that in education I cannot promise miracles. There will be dull children and tedious pedagogues to the end of time. We cannot expect to treble the efficiency of education in a year, or even in a decade, but I can say with confidence that, even if all the hopes of the friends of education have not been realised in the last five years, even if we have had to submit to many disappointments and the postponement of many schemes to which we attach great value, there has, nevertheless, been in every part of the educational field, from the elementary school to the university, an increased activity and a greater receptiveness to new ideas, to new knowledge, and to new methods than has been manifested, so far as I know, in any other period of equivalent length in our history. Part of the increased interest in educational subjects is no doubt due to the War, part to a series of discoveries in every department of intellectual life, recalling the discoveries of the Renaissance, discoveries in physics, discoveries in Greek archæology, discoveries in almost, every branch of history and science—so that our text books require to be rewritten from beginning to end—but I venture to think that I am not far wrong in claiming that part also, and that no small part, is due to the liberal supplies with which this Government and this House have endeavoured to forward the work of education in all its branches.

Mr. ASQUITH: I very much regret that owing to other calk I was not able to hear the whole, or indeed more than a very small part, of my right hon. Friend's statement, but what I heard myself and what I have heard from others gives me a very hopeful and encouraging view of the attitude which he has persisted in maintaining in regard to what I should think the most retrograde of all forms of disguised and perverted economy, the cutting down of expenditure upon our system of national education in any one of its branches or stages. I am sure there could be no worse or more misguided or more undiscriminating operation given to the very legitimate demand of the country for the reduction of Government expenditure than that we should cut into and undermine in any of its branches or stages our system of national education. I had the opportunity a few
weeks ago of stating at some length my view upon the subject, confirmed and corroborated by the experience which I had gained as Chairman of the Commission on the two ancient Universities, and if I now interpose for a moment, and only for a moment, it is to ask from my right lion. Friend an assurance upon one particular point. It is proposed to reduce the sum which has hitherto been allotted by Parliament, not to Oxford and Cambridge, but to what we may call the local universities of the country, a proposal which I confess I regard with suspicion and indeed with hostility. It does not come. I understand, under this Vote.

Mr. FISHER: No.

Mr. ASQUITH: I think the grant for Universities is met under the Treasury Vote, and therefore it would not be in order to raise the question in this Debate. I do not think it can be raised on the salary of the President of the Board of Education.

Mr. FISHER: It does come under the Treasury Vote.

Mr. ASQUITH: What I want, if I can, is to get a definite assurance from my right hon. Friend that we shall have an opportunity, a real opportunity, of discussing this vitally important matter when the Treasury Vote comes on. We all know that towards the close of Supply, Votes are apt to be telescoped, and topics sometimes of vital importance are crowded out from the later days of Committee of Supply, and I am sure it would be a matter of very great significance to all friends of education—I am glad to see the Patronage Secretary of the Treasury there—if he could give us some assurance that this question of the reduction of the grants to the local universities will be afforded an adequate opportunity for real discussion when the Treasury Vote comes on.

Mr. FISHER: If a request is made through the usual channels, certainly time will be given.

Mr. ASQUITH: I am glad to hear that.

Mr. HOGGE: The Minister of Education apologised to the Committee for the length of time that he took in making his statement, but I should like to assure him that those of us who are interested in this vast subject of education agree with him that the opportunities for discussing
education in the House of Commons are so few, and that the time that we have at our disposal is so little, that he cannot be charged with having taken an excessive amount of time in which to lay this important subject before the Committee. I think also it is fair to the Minister to say at once that his references to the now notorious Geddes suggestions with regard to cuts in education are of such a nature, or have been of such a nature, as to lead us to suppose that we have in him a Minister of Education who places the correct value on education as a contribution to the life of the community.
There are three ways in which we can test the success of our educational schemes in this country. The Minister mentioned some himself in the course of his speech, when he was referring to some of the machinery of our educational system, but if we put them together we probably have as practical a test as can be found of efficiency in our educational system. Those three items are, first, the adequacy of school accommodation: second, the adequacy of our staffing arrangements, including both the number of teachers and the degree of training of teachers and the average size of the classes: and, third, the physical condition of the children. If, therefore, we find our educational machine operating in such a way that we have not, as the Minister himself has pointed out, sufficient accommodation for the children of the country—not only sufficient accommodation from the point of view of places in our schools, but buildings which, from the health point of view, from the point of view of one of the most delicate things in the school, namely, sanitation, are absolutely in many districts inadequate, buildings which the Minister himself has pointed out are in such a state of disrepair that if they are not speedily repaired the nation will be forced to incur much heavier cost in erecting new buildings—if it is therefore the case that there is that deficiency in accommodation, by the amount of that deficiency our educational scheme falls short, and it is the duty of this Committee to try to provide methods by which it can be made good.
So it is with the question of staffing. Incidentally, when I am talking about staffing, I might refer to the question of the teachers' salaries. The right hon. Gentleman apologised to some extent for the increase in the teachers' salaries, but
I think he gave adequate reasons to the Committee why, of the professional classes, the teacher, as a particular class, has perhaps waited longer for adequate remuneration for his services than any other type of professional men. In fact, at one time, the most serious aspect of that question was that the supply of male and female students of the training colleges throughout the country was drying up because of the inadequate remuneration of the services for which they were certificated when they were through their colleges, and, more than that, the fact that of most professional classes the teacher has to look forward for a much longer time to occupying the empty places of those who precede him on the staff than perhaps any other professional class, and if there was one thing needed, and needed more quickly than another, it was an inducement to the man and woman, the boy and girl, with brains to take up the teaching profession, with a certain knowledge that for the future there was a much better and wider outlook in the profession than there had ever been at any previous time. Those of us who work together on this side of the House would deplore more than we could express any attempt to reduce the standard of the teaching material that we want to bring into our elementary and higher schools. The better the material we can use to fashion the brains of the youth of this country, the better the contribution we are making to the future of this country, and in maintaining the salaries at an adequate sum my right hon. Friend certainly has the support of those of us who act together on this side of the House. I come to the question of the wherewithal by which these things are to be achieved. The right hon. Member for the City of London (Sir F. Banbury) intervened at one point of the President's speech with the obvious question as to where the money was to be got. Of course we are in somewhat straitened financial circumstances.

Sir F. BANBURY: Not "somewhat."

Mr. HOGGE: I will go the whole hog, and say "straitened circumstances,' but that is largely due to extravagant expenditure in other directions by the Government, of which, unfortunately, the President of the Board of Education is a
member. He is associated with a Government which has spent the money in directions which will bring no good to this country. [An HON. MEMBER: "Housing."] The particular item does not matter. Money has been spent which could have been saved for the purpose of improving our educational machine, and while we are quite prepared to face economies in the machine itself, wherever it can be achieved, we are not prepared to effect economies at the expense of educational efficiency. It is a question of working a ladder from the elementary school to the university. The rungs in that ladder are pretty close right up to the time when the pupil leaves the elementary school, but from that place in the ladder the steps are not nearly so close, and they are much more difficult to overtake. We want to make the rungs in that part of the ladder as adequate as they are at the lower part of the ladder, so that, without fee, the child of the British citizen—in this ease, particularly the English and Welsh citizen—will be able to move from the elementary school to the highest point that our educational ladder, with his or her brains and energy, will take him or her. That is the idea, and so long as you make that as free as possible, we are prepared to support a scheme which will enable you to do so. It fails at the point of the secondary school. It fails in the small proportion of free places in the secondary school compared with fee places. We want less fees and more frees in those secondary schools. It is probable that we require to devote very much more attention to this than to any other part of the educational ladder.
One would gather the impression from some of the interjections and remarks made in the course of the Debate that it is foolish to give our children so much education. It was suggested from below the Gangway by several Members that it was a waste of money and waste of public effort to give education to children who, we were told, were not fit to make a good use of it. I do not believe in that doctrine at all. I do not believe in the starving of the opportunity of any child at the time when it can receive practically the only equipment that it does not get by its own unaided effort. I think this argument will appeal to many Members. I have said we are in straitened financial circumstances. As a nation we are so
to-day, but, as a matter of fact, our working classes are permanently in straitened circumstances, and, therefore, the only real contribution of great value that any parent can give to his children is the contribution of an effective education. There is no Death Duty on that. It is left to the child, and the child with its own brains, its own energy and its own enterprise can then probably make a far better use of its life than it otherwise would. It is up to us, therefore, to make that contribution to the child Perhaps I may again make an incidental reference. The President, in talking about schools for defectives, used some rather apologetic phrases about the expense of those schools. I think we owe more to that type of child than to the healthy child. The defective child is a result of our industrial and economic conditions. There are two ways of dealing with a defective child. You can put it out of existence, which would relieve you of the expense of maintaining it, or you must make up to it that of which society has deprived it in the circumstances in which it has been born. My right hon. Friend waxed eloquent—and rightly eloquent—about the blind and the deaf schools, but there are many other deficiencies in children which, perhaps, have not the same tragedy as blindness or deafness, but which are a handicap to the child in life, which the State must assist, because the State is in debt to the child. I am certain that everyone will agree with that statement. Therefore, I hope my right hon. Friend will not be afraid of expenditure of this type.
There is another question with which I would like to deal at once, because I think it was the worst thing that my right hon. Friend said this afternoon, and I hope he will retreat from the position he took up with regard to the feeding of necessitous school children. He pointed out that there was going to be a decrease of over £700,000, and he pointed out that, in future, the Board of Education wished to deprive themselves of the responsibility of dealing with the feeding of necessitous school children.

Mr. FISHER: Not at all. I pointed out that we propose to limit the expenditure on necessitous school children to £300,000, half of which will be found from grants from the rates, that being
a figure which is amply sufficient for dealing with the normal feeding. My point was that it was very difficult for us to control expenditure when there were great waves of unemployment, and when you have to spend something like £1,000,000 in feeding necessitous school children.

Mr. HOGGE: So far as I have misunderstood my right hon. Friend—if I have—of course, I apologise, but I take him to mean that while he, as President of the Board of Education, proposes still to be responsible for a figure which will cover the normal feeding of all necessitous school children, anything beyond that must be found by the boards of guardians.

Mr. FISHER: Not necessarily necessitous. The main idea of the Provision of Meals Act was to provide school canteens for those children who, it was considered, might require a meal at school. The original idea was that in most cases the parents should meet that expense. But it was also realised that there were a certain number of children who were unable to profit by their schooling by reason of poverty, and it, therefore, became a common thing to provide for these necessitous children. We propose to continue the feeding up to a sum of £300,000.

Mr. HOGGE: I quite appreciate that, but my right hon. Friend knows that it is the teacher in the school who recommends the child for food on account of mal-nutrition, and if the teachers of the 20,000 elementary schools recommend that certain children shall be fed, it must continue to be the duty of the President of the Board of Education to look after that feeding, and to find the money for it, and he must not contemplate, in what he calls abnormal cases, resorting to the Boards of Guardians, because does not he see, and does not the Committee see, that the vicious result of that would be that the poorer districts of this country would be required to bear, as a contribution from the rates, the greater part of the expense of maintaining those children? That is a charge which, we think, ought to be laid on the back of the whole State, because if, through malnutrition, a child is unable to benefit from the teaching which the State provides, it must obviously be helped by everybody taking a share of the burden. I hope, if
I have misunderstood my right hon. Friend, he or the Under-Secretary will, during the further discussion, deal with that particular point.
There is one other point. I was very much struck with the fact that my right hon. Friend was satisfied on the question of inspection with one report from each school inside the period of three years. This is a question which I have frequently discussed here and elsewhere. I have always regretted the fact that we passed over from examination to inspection. I believe it has a deleterious effect upon the education in our schools. It is quite true that examination in individual subjects may have prevented children moving up into higher standards from year to year, but I am quite certain of this, the system of inspection is open to criticism. Incidentally inspectors are not always practical teachers. There are far too many of the inspectors who never have had any practical experience of teaching in our schools. They have come straight from the British universities; men of the type referred to by the right hon. Gentleman who are first class civil servants. These men are put into these positions instead of the positions being open to the teaching profession, at all events more than they are to-day. Still, I believe the visit of men of this sort occasionally to the schools and to the teacher is of real value in ascertaining the intellectual progress of the child. If you test by the three R's, reading, writing, and 'rithmetic, I am perfectly certain the old scheme of examination, by which the children went up when they were able to achieve a certain standard in the elementary things that mattered, was a far better system and produced far better results than does the inspection scheme now.
I know you will not, and probably cannot, ban inspection, but I do suggest there is great room for combining the two systems; that while children may be moved up on the report of the inspector, and some children may be kept where they are with examination, these two things could be combined, and I think probably you would get better results. I do think that for the money we spend, and in view of the results achieved, we should certainly allow the Minister of Education
a larger staff, so that we might ascertain what the children are getting for the millions we spend upon education. On this point I make this further observation. The right hon. Gentleman suggests that the headmasters, particularly in our small schools, should teach more than they do. I agree very thoroughly with that suggestion. I spent some years of my life in one of the biggest elementary schools in Edinburgh. I remember the headmaster—now dead, so that any reference I make will not appear to be personal—spent the whole of his time in the headmaster's room, taken up with routine work, keeping the log, answering questions from the departments of the local School Board, and he was the highest salaried man on the staff and supposed to be the best and most capabl1 teacher on the staff. Yet I, who was then serving as a pupil teacher, and had not even gone to the training college, was frequently sent by that headmaster, under whom I served, to take his class and to teach it while he was looking after all this paraphernalia in his room.
I thoroughly agree that in the small schools they have placed upon the shoulders of the headmaster what can be done by a clerk. That it should be so done, instead of releasing the headmaster to be an effective unit on the teaching staff of the school, is folly. I very much hope my right hon. Friend will pursue that question and the many others to which he has referred. There are many other things that one might refer to in a big subject of this kind, but as time is short and others desire to speak I will refrain. I should like, however, to close by saying this: that we on this side of the House take the view that education is the most effective contribution that we can make to the future of our country, that expenditure upon it is the finest form of reproductive expenditure that you could devise, and that while there are many other things possibly that people placed in better circumstances in life can do in regard to their children, there is one thing possible only to the great mass of the children of this country, and that is a fair chance, through the elementary and secondary schools, to, if possible, the university. It is the duty of this House of Commons, which represents the parents of these children, and therefore is the guardian of the future education of these children, to make it easy that what is
asked should be achieved for every child in the country.

Sir PHILIP MAGNUS: I venture to think that there will be very little disagreement in the country or in this Committee in respect to the speech of the hon. Gentleman who has just sat down or in respect to the speech of my right hon. Friend the President of the Board of Education. All those interested in education have looked forward to to-day, and my right hon. Friend, in introducing these Estimates, has given those broad views on the general principles of education which have been so fully repeated by the last speaker, and in which I think all Members of this House on both sides, and among all parties, entirely agree. Personally, I could not help commiserating with my right hon. Friend with having to discharge what I cannot help thinking was to him a rather painful duty. That was to give reasons for any economy what ever in the discharge of his duties as President of the Board of Education.
It is a great many years since we had anyone at the head of the Board who was so pronounced an idealist, if I may be permitted to say so, as our right hon. Friend the President. It is naturally very painful for him, and very difficult, to have to defend, as he has had to defend to-day, the economies which he proposes to introduce into the system. I was very much struck with the speech of the President—I do not know the occasion, so I cannot give him the reference—in which he said:
The education of the masses rests on the right of human beings to be considered as ends in themselves, and to be entitled to know and enjoy all the best that life can afford in the sphere of knowledge, emotion, and hope.
That is a very fine ideal. We all would like to be able to attain it, but we cannot help considering, in connection with an ideal of that kind, the means by which that ideal can be attained. I take it that when my right hon. Friend spoke of "the masses" he at the same time included "the classes," and all the other citizens of a great country. That is the difficulty that confronted him. He has been obliged to go back to a certain extent upon the schemes of general education which during the previous three or four years he has brought before the House. I think it has been a very great advantage to us that we should have had as
President anyone endowed with the ideas which tend to lift up the whole community as do these ideas of our President.
Directly we come to consider economies there are natural objections to every one of them. The only general statement as regards the economies which were suggested in the Geddes Report is that there is no greater fallacy than to suppose that the efficiency of education bears any direct proportion to the money spent upon it. That is an idea opposed to experience—the idea that if you doubled the salaries of the teachers they would give twice as much attention to their work. To my mind, that is not by any means the case. I believe what we want to find is enthusiastic teachers devoted to their wprk—I will not say teachers who discharge their duties altogether irrespective of the pay they receive—for we want them to be adequately remunerated, but the idea should not enter the mind of the teacher that his efficiency as a teacher depends entirely upon the amount of salary he receives. At any rate, that was not the idea that existed in times gone by. I believe that one of the charges made against the sophists in Athens was that they accepted remuneration for the instruction they gave. I have also read that it was the bounden duty of every father in ancient Judea to train his son in some trade or manual occupation in order when he rose to the highest possible position in the community, that of a teacher, he need not be dependent upon remuneration as a teacher. Be that as it may, I think one ought not to suppose that by necessarily increasing the cost of education you thereby increase efficiency. I was very much struck by a letter which appeared in the "Times" one day this week, written by Sir Alfred Hopkinson, a gentleman whom are know very well. He said:
It is the commonest, but the worst of heresies to imagine that by increasing the expenditure on any form of education you necessarily increase its efficiency. If the amount spent on education were to be suddenly trebled next year the education given would probably be less efficient than it is even now.
I only make this remark in order to refute the assertion made time after time, that we must not economise upon education, upon either its administration or the salaries paid to the teachers, because the more you spend on
education so much the better it is for the country at large! For that reason one must consider in detail what are and ought to be the economies that may be effected. I may quote another instance the result of my own immediate observation in modern times, and it is this: I do not remember ever seeing more efficient teaching in elementary schools than I saw some few years ago when examining schools in Dublin and in Paris, schools run entirely by Les Frères Chrétiens. In these, the teaching was of a most efficient character. The teachers were enthusiastic, and as far as I know, they received no separate remuneration for the work they did.
The tendency of the work of the Board of Education in recent years has been, if I may be allowed to say so without disrespect to the President, to discourage to some extent voluntary effort. I think what we want to see in our schools is as much variety as possible. Personally, I am not in favour of all our schools being brought under the direct control of the Board of Education. I would like to see a larger amount of responsibility thrown upon our local authorities because they consist of men who, to a great extent, give their services voluntarily in the cause of education, and they are the men who devote much time to it with the best possible effects. I have here a Report of the Committee on National Education and a memorandum of the Association of Education Committees in regard to the Geddes Report, and I cannot find that they approve of any single economy suggested. As regards secondary school grants, they say that
private benefactions seem now to be entirely diverted to modern universities.
I think of all the Geddes cuts the most unkindest cut of all was to assert that private benefactions are being entirely diverted to our modern universities, which happen to be represented in this House by the President of the Board of Education. There is no doubt that private benefactions to education generally are being lessened in consequence of the fact that the State is doing so much to assist education, My right hon. Friend referred to several schools which are prepared to accept Government grants or otherwise they
would have to raise their fees. I would like to say that the schools which have allowed themselves to come under the Board of Education are more numerous than the very small number which the President has suggested. I know of several schools belonging to city companies which have now agreed to take grants from the Board of Education.

Mr. FISHER: I was only alluding to the schools specially mentioned.

Sir P. MAGNUS: University College, London, the school in which I was educated, has accepted Government grants, and has come under the Board of Education. I feel certain that the parents of the pupils in that school district could have afforded to pay higher fees, and I think the school might have continued to give the splendid education it used to give when I was a pupil, free from any control by a Government Department. That seems to me to be one objection to the general trend of public opinion at the present time. I will quote another passage from the letter written by Sir Alfred Hopkinson. Speaking of the tendency to place these schools under the direct control of the Board of Education, he says:
One of the causes of the downfall of Germany was the moral tone of much of the thorough and systematic education given to its people; but there seems to be a spirit abroad in our own land to-day that will lead, if unchecked, to a more deadly downfall from which there will be no recovery.
There is nothing in the past that I have objected to more than this tendency to Germanise the secondary education of this country, and I hope the people will take to heart the serious results that have followed from the complete control of secondary education in Germany by the State. As regards possible economies that may be effected, I find in a report of a Committee of the British Science Guild certain suggestions which are not in any way opposed to education. Most of the economies which the Guild have suggested could be carried out without any injury to its efficiency. Those in favour of economies, even the right hon. Gentleman the Member for the City of London (Sir F. Banbury), are unwilling to do anything to affect the efficiency of our education. In their memorandum the British Science Guild say:
The allotment of 50 per cent, of local commitments has in practice entailed un-
expected and costly consequences, is subversive of the principle of local administration, and has led to an unnecessary multiplication of officials doing the same work with obvious unnecessary expense.
I hope that some remarks will be made with regard to the recommendation made in the same Report to the effect that—
The present scholarship system might reasonably be modified by limiting free places and maintenance grants for a time to those who have exceptional capacity, but whose parents cannot pay for their further education.
I understand that that is one of the subjects which will be further considered by the President of the Board of Education. I agree that the avenues to education ought to be made as wide as possible by which every child in the kingdom who is competent by circumstances and ability to profit by higher education should have the necessary opportunities; but to give this kind of education to children who are not likely to make any use of it is a great waste of money which we ought to endeavour as far as possible to avoid. The Committee of the Science Guild further say:
This free education should be available in schools of widely varying types, as recommended by the Departmental Committee on Scholarships and Free Places.
Here I think the Board have interfered in a manner which is not conducive to education, because they have limited their scholarships to children in grant-aided schools. The consequence is that the children of parents who are making great sacrifices for the education of their children will not have the opportunity of obtaining scholarships which are tenable in any university. The question of duplicate inspectorship has been discussed by the President in his very able speech, and he has promised to give the subject further consideration. He has said that the Board receive only one report from every elementary school every three years, but that inspectors visit the schools much more frequently. I suggest that there should be some arrangement between the local authorities and the Board of Education with regard to the inspection of schools which should not be too frequent. We should endeavour to secure competent and enthusiastic teachers and trust them and not over-inspect them. Certainly it is most inadvisable that too frequent inspection should take place by the Board's
inspectors and by the inspectors of the local authorities.
I would like a general arrangement to be made between our local authorities and the Board of Education, so as to avoid duplication of inspection. It would be a great advantage to many of our secondary schools if they could be regularly inspected by our local universities. I have thrown out these remarks, as it seems to me to be a duty on the part of those on this side of the House to criticise the work of the Board of Education because it is not likely to be criticised on the other side of the House. I do not know that there is any occasion on which the Estimates have been brought forward by a President in regard to whom there is more general agreement as to the deep interest which he takes in the education of the whole country, and the advantage, which I think for years we have not realised, of having as President a gentleman with such qualifications as the gentleman who now presides over the Education Department.

Mr. AMMON: I remember with what enthusiasm I, and others outside, hailed the advent of the present President of the Board of Education to his present office, having regard to the reputation he had made in Oxford and Sheffield. I am sorry to say that all those hopes have been doomed to disappointment during the time which the right hon. Gentleman has been in office. I know of no more pathetic figure in British public life than the President of the Board of Education. The right hon. Gentleman has given expression to the very highest ideals in excellent speeches. Again and again we expected that he would "deliver the goods," but there is no proof in the speech which he has just delivered of realising the hopes which the right hon. Gentleman has stirred up in the minds of the people. We have to face the actual position which is put before us. I think the right hon. Gentleman would have done a very much greater service to education if, after enunciating his high ideals and putting them before the public, and finding the Government was unsympathetic, he had come out of it and let the public know that he was really in earnest. In that way he would have done a greater service, and he would have raised the enthusiasm of those interested in education to a
much greater extent than he has done up to the present time.
6.0 P.M.
In listening to the speech of the President and the speech delivered by the last speaker (Sir P. Magnus), one was reminded that after all, when we have stripped it of all the verbiage, these gentlemen would carry us back to the condition of things called by the Committee of Council in 1839 education "suited to the condition of workmen and servants." In fact they want our education to be purely a class matter, setting up a class war and class differences amongst the mass of the people, making it more difficult for them to get on in a manner that one would expect them to get on. The hon. Gentleman who has just sat down said that you cannot estimate the value of the teaching wholly by the amount of money expended upon it. That is true, but you cannot draw a parallel between the condition of Athens and our commercial system where everything is valued on a cash basis, and all these high ideals have very little hope of being carried out. It is necessary that those who are engaged in the teaching profession, if they are going to give their best in training and directing the young, should be free from the burden and worry of economic necessities, and at least they should have a sufficient income to keep them above the border line of continual worry and distress. Even learned people make very great mistakes and contradict themselves in a short speech. While the hon. Member opposite was deploring the money spent on education and pressing the view that we have to economise, he went on to say that he believed that there should be a highway for every child to proceed to the Very best possible education. Yon cannot, provide that highway unless you provide the necessary money, and if you provide the money the importance of the expenditure in the view of those concerned with the education of the people is not to be measured so much by the amount of individual teaching, but rather by the greater number of children who are given an opportunity for a bigger and broader education. That is the case we want to put before the Committee. The President of the Board has told us of the economies that are going to be effected. They are enough, I am sure, to make anyone con-
cerned with education weep and feel real regret at what it means in throwing back the education of the present generation and denying to many thousands of likely children—the potential wealth of this country—any possibility of the development of real education to help us win back our place and position in the world. If I understood the right hon. Gentleman correctly the money to be paid out to the education authorities is to be paid out largely in the form of block grants—a certain sum of money is going to be supplied and the authorities will have to keep their demands upon that expenditure within those limits. It is true the right hon. Gentleman said that on certain points they are not giving effect to the recommendations of the Geddes Committee. They may not be doing it directly, but there are other ways of doing it. Pressure has been brought to bear on education authorities which, if not directly, has intimidated them into cutting down their expenses. It has had the effect of reducing facilities, of overcrowding children in class rooms, and of making it possible that teachers will be dismissed.
All these things are happening. I was in a school yesterday in one of the poorest parts of this city. That school had not been painted for 16 years, and the authorities are told that they cannot hope to have it painted for the next year or two, because they will get no assistance and will not rank for the 50 per cent, grant from the Board of Education. That is typical of many schools. [An HON. MEMBER: "Is that a private school?"] It is a London County Council school. I went to Bedford the other day, and I found in that county some schools had been closed and others were overcrowded, and in one case actually the teachers were teaching two-classes in a room, the teachers being back to back with a gangway between them, and they were shouting against each other. That is part of the condition which is already being brought about under the right hon. Gentleman's administration and jurisdiction! It is well to remember, in regard to these matters, exactly where we stood a few years ago and where we stand at the present moment.
The report of the Departmental Committee on Scholarships and Free Places, in 1920 stated that there were no fewer
than 75 per cent, of the children attending elementary schools who were capable of profiting by secondary education. The children who go into these free places from the elementary schools have to have a very much higher standard of education than those who are fee paying. We are in fact demanding from those who have had the least opportunities both by environment and by up-bringing to get the best education, a very much higher standard than we seek from the others, and yet in face of all that it is well to remember that, in 1920, 11,134 of these children were refused admission to secondary schools because there were no free places for them, and, in addition to that, there were no fewer than 10,076 children who could not be provided for because of insufficient accommodation. I have no hesitation in saying that the action of economising on education has been the biggest blow struck at the supremacy of this nation since the military attempt in 1914. It is one of the most disastrous things possible. We can afford to cut down almost anything rather than expenditure on the education of our children in these days, because, in spite of all that may be said, in spite of the criticisms we have had regarding the German system of education, the Germans are nevertheless going to be a most serious menace to us in the struggles we have to face, and their standard of education gives a much larger number of children a bigger share in Higher Education.
Having said that I want to draw the right hon. Gentleman's attention, and the attention of the Committee, to the peculiar position that has arisen in London in consequence of the action of the Board of Education in refusing to carry out their side of the agreement, as it was understood, by the London County Council in reference to the salaries of teachers. I do not know whether I caught the right hon. Gentleman quite accurately—he will correct me if I am wrong—but I gathered he said that the Burnham Committee was not a Government Committee, that the Government were not bound by its decisions, and I think, too, he suggested there should be some sort of Committee set up to provide a national settlement on the question of teachers' salaries.

Mr. FISHER: I never said that.

Mr. AMMON: That is what I understood.

Mr. FISHER: I am sorry I did not make myself quite clear. What I said was that the Burnham Committee was not a Government Committee. It was not a Committee of the Board of Education, but the Board allowed some of its members to attend the Committee, in order to assist it with information as to facts. Lord Burnham himself has fully admitted that the Board was not bound by the decisions of the Committee. Of course, when the Committee did report, its report was considered by the Board and, in conjunction with the Chancellor' of the Exchequer, we came to certain conclusions on the report. We accepted it with certain qualifications and modifications, which I stated in my letter to Lord Burnham.

Mr. AMMON: But I gathered from the right hon. Gentleman that he expressed his own desire that some form of machinery should be set up to deal with the question of teachers' salaries.

Mr. FISHER: I said I thought it was a very convenient thing to have the machinery of the Burnham Committee, and I hoped that that would be used for the purpose. I am sorry if I did not make myself quite clear.

Mr. AMMON: The position which I find very difficult to accept is this. If the right hon. Gentleman had his own representatives attending the Burnham Committee, and hearing all the discussions, surely they were a party to a great extent to its report along with the representatives of the local educational authorities.

Mr. FISHER: Again I am afraid I have not made myself quite clear. I am sorry to have to intervene. When I was asked whether I would allow any of the officers of the Board to be present at the discussions of the Burnham Committee, I made it perfectly clear that I could not permit any of my officers to be present at those discussions unless it was understood that they were not to commit my Board. That was understood by Lord Burnham himself, and by all the members of the Committee. It must not be said, therefore, that the presence of officers at the Board at the discussions of Lord Burnham's Committee in any way committed me or my right hon.
Friend the Chancellor of the Exchequer. I merely allowed my officers to go there in order to be of some help to the Committee by giving it facts and figures.

Mr. AMMON: I certainly have no wish to misrepresent the position of the President of the Board of Education in this matter. I fully understand and appreciate his point, but I still say that the right hon. Gentleman could not have representatives on that Committee who heard all the discussions and knew all that was going on, and then wholly divest himself of any share of the responsibility arising from any decision the Committee may have arrived at. I put that forward as my personal opinion, and I say it, particularly having regard to the fact that the report of that Committee has been accepted, to a certain extent, by the right hon. Gentleman. The position I want to put is one which has arisen in connection with the salaries of the elementary school teachers under the London County Council. By the block grant that has been carried this year, the London County Council must find themselves with a deficiency of something like £312,855. At the beginning of 1920 the relations between the London County Council and the teachers were considerably strained, and there was a demonstration outside the County Hall, where members of the London County Council were besieged, and the hon. Member for Fulham (Sir Cyril Cobb), the Chairman of the Education Committee, had to seek another way out of the Council Chamber so as to avoid being recognised by those who were demonstrating. If I remember aright the right hon. Gentleman himself was present at a meeting in the Kingsway Hall and suffered from a similar demonstration. We appear to be getting past that trouble now. Discussions were held, and the teachers agreed to accept the Burnham scale on the understanding that the carry-over should be in one year instead of being spread over two or three years. That was agreed to and put into force somewhere about April, 1920, and it had been in operation for some months without any intimation having been received from the Board of Education that they dissented from it in any way. However, after a period of six months it was conveyed to the London County Council that this arrangement would not rank for grant.
In the letter sent to the London County Council the right hon. Gentleman was not wholly correct in his history. Again and again he refers to the acceptance of the Report of Lord Burnham's Committee and to the agreement between the council and the teachers. Let it be remembered that the right hon. Gentleman's own representative was there, and knew what was going on, and although the arrangement was communicated to the Department in February, it was not until July of the same year—some months afterwards—that any intimation was conveyed to the council of any dissension as to the action of the council paying these salaries in the manner they were being paid. The position of the council now is that they will either have to break faith with their teachers—a thing no large public body would care to do—or they will have to cut down salaries, or they will have to dismiss something like 2,000 teachers. Of course, the last alternative is utterly unthinkable in these days. If this part of the bargain is not observed by the Board of Education, then it is going to throw an increased burden on the London ratepayers of £196,000. After all, the main issue is economy. It is ridiculous to suggest any economy like that when it simply means that you are ceasing to take the money out of one pocket and taking it instead from the other pocket. Further than that, you are proposing to take it out of the pocket of the people who can least afford to pay it. It does mean that the poorest districts are going to bear an increasing burden, because of their poverty and of the difficulties under which they labour. That will arise from the Minister of Education not carrying out his side of the bargain, which is perfectly clear.
The composition of the London County Council is similar to that of the majority party in this House, and they are unanimous in declaring that there is something approaching a breach of understanding between the Board of Education and the London County Council's Education Committee in this matter. The agreement we came to with the teachers was communicated to the Department, and they took some months before they gave a reply. On the basis of that agreement we arrived at a settlement with the teachers, and we ought to honour it and carry it out. I hope that, when the right hon. Gentleman comes to reply, he will
at any rate give some assurance that in that particular case he is going to keep faith and meet the London County Council in this matter. Otherwise, one will be forced to the conclusion that it is not so much a matter of economy as of taking the burden off the shoulders of those who are best able to bear it and piling it up on the shoulders of the poorest people, at the same time putting the education authorities in a very difficult position with their teaching staff. I much deplore the speech of the right hon. Gentleman, particularly in view of his reputation and of the speeches that he has made outside. His speech was a retrograde one in every sense of the word so far as the education of the country is concerned. It is sowing the seeds of great economic disaster in the days to come, and really, in the long run, it means that ultimately the children are to be made to bear the burden and the cost of the War.

Sir J. D. REES: No one would have thought, who heard the President of the Board of Education, that he was dealing with the dispensation of money collected with great difficulty from the almost empty pockets of the taxpayers and ratepayers of this country. Rather did I think he seemed to feel that, when the river of the rates joined the flood of the taxes, the mingled stream was sufficient, like the fabled Pactolus of old, to cover the whole country with gold. I have no intention of dealing with any particular items, except one with regard to which I put down an Amendment, in the hope that it would assure me a brief hearing this afternoon. Before coming to that, may I refer to one question upon which I think an explanation might be useful to other hon. Members besides myself? The Estimates for the year 1922–23 amount, as hon. Members will see, to £75,450,000 from rates and taxes. Adding to that £13,000,000, which is roughly the figure for Scotland, one gets £88,000,000 as the probable total expenditure in the current year upon education. Turning, however, to the Geddes Report, one finds a figure of £103,000,000. That shows a difference of some £15,000,000, the greater proportion of which—say £10,000,000— must be spent, if spent at all, by the right hon. Gentleman's Department. I would ask the right hon. Gentleman, will he kindly say exactly what is to be the total expenditure on education up to the
31st March next? Is it to be £103,000,000, as estimated by the Geddes Committee, or is it to be the £75,000,000 of this Estimate, plus £13,000,000 for Scotland, that is to say, £88,000,000 together? I do not propose to go into the question at length, because there are many hon. Members present who may fairly be considered to be what is called technically more interested in education than myself, though none would be more glad to see a most careful and critical examination of expenture at a time when the country is in such serious financial straits.

Mr. FISHER: The Estimate for the coming year is £75,450,000 for England and Wales, and, I think, something like £13,000,000 for Scotland.

Sir J. D. REES: That leaves £15,000,000 unexplained.

Mr. FISHER: I am only concerned with the Board of Education's Estimate, and that is the Estimate for the year. I do not know what are the other figures which the hon. Baronet has mentioned.

Sir J. D. REES: I took them from the Geddes Report, and, as there is that difference, I think it might be worth the while of the right hon. Gentleman to explain it. I come now to the Amendment which I put down. In the Estimates before the House, there is a sum for the higher education of ex-officers and men at the Universities. Taking the figures given in this Estimate, the expenditure under this head, which was to have been £6,000,000, is now to be £8,000,000, and the selection of officers of the Army and Navy who are to benefit by this scheme has not ended, but was continuing up to quite recently. I have often brought this matter before the House, but have never obtained any support, and I feel that my voice is still the voice of one crying in the wilderness. I will not, however, cry very long, but will try to make my tears as short as possible. The theory, I believe, is that this £6,000,000—now £8,000,000—which is to be spent upon educating these officers will make up for a gap in the education of those who were previously in the habit of going to a university, and were diverted from the university for the far more important service of fighting for their country. I venture to suggest, however, that these officers were not people who required this public assistance. I do not
say that without having endeavoured to find out. No nominal roll is published to show that these gentlemen, who are obtaining the most expensive education in the world, cannot afford to pay for it, or, indeed, that there was any necessity that they should have this education. In point of fact, it is not necessary for any particular individual to be educated at the university at the expense of the taxpayer. It is, no doubt, most desirable that those who are conspicuously capable should have this class of education, and means exist by which those with or without funds may get it. But here we have 30,000 officers sent to participate in this extremely expensive education at the cost of the general taxpayer, who himself cannot afford, except in very rare cases, to send his own children to these universities. We have 30,000 officers sent to enjoy what must necessarily be for the most part confined to the most well-to-do classes in the country.
If these gentlemen really are indigent, it is of very doubtful benefit to them to receive an education the hall-mark of which is a blend of intellectual arrogance and sentimental Socialism. I am not merely laying my own opinion before the Committee. One of the most able men in the City said that it takes five years to eradicate the evil effects of a university education. If young men are really indigent, if they are not able to afford this class of education, the worst thing that can happen to them is that they should be kept for three or four years away from practical life, obtaining education which is likely to be of very little use to them in the future. I confess that the character of the education given whets my appetite to put an end to this expenditure, but I maintain on ordinary grounds that it is unfair that the taxpayer should be put to the great expense of meeting it; and the ratepayer in Scotland is cruelly oppressed in order to provide his share. Why do not we have a list of the beneficiaries, so that the Committee may be able to judge for themselves—names are sometimes very tell-tale things—whether these officers are proper recipients for this eleemosynary education. I submit, even to those who really welcome expenditure on education, irrespectively of its object or results, that there is a case for the most careful and meticulous dispensation of the money
collected with the utmost difficulty just now from the overburdened taxpayers and ratepayers, and not for continuing this experiment, which, as I think, is a piece of fantastic benevolence for a particular class. I have seen large numbers of these youths who are now crowding into the universities. They are there in their thousands at Oxford and Cambridge, and I protest that they are not people whose pecuniary circumstances are such as to require or justify expenditure upon them out of the taxes and rates.
I presume that the Act of 1918 authorised such a charge as this—I really do not know. I do remember that Act passing through the House. I was one of the 30 enthusiastic educationists who were able to attend! The Act was passed by a small handful of Members, of whom I was the only one who ever inquired into what it was going to cost. [HON. MEMBERS: "No!"] I do submit that there is a case, and I hope the right hon. Gentleman will explain why these officers cannot now be sent away from the universities to take that practical part in life for which this education is presumed to fit them. It is not the case now that they require a university degree in order to get a job. A university degree now does not obtain anyone a job. Very often it is an obstacle to getting a job, because it has given the possessor fastidious tastes and habits which may very well unfit him for the rough-and-tumble of life, though it may be that it fits him to sit on these benches. It was stated on one occasion, when I referred to this matter, that everyone who goes to the university shares in some, degree in the public assistance of social service funds. That is true to some extent, because of the grants of £30,000 a year which the older universities obtain. An hon. Member threw that at me, saying that I had participated in it. It would make no difference if I had, but I should like to say that I never was there, and that at the time when I should have been there I was already a wage slave in India. I do not wish to go further into this. I could desire that someone had charge of this reduction who had some power of invective and denunciation which I have not, to be able to impress upon the President of the Board of Trade that it is right and proper that there should be a reduction
in this charge, which the taxpayer and the ratepayer cannot afford.

The DEPUTY-CHAIRMAN (Sir E. Cornwall): Do I understand the hon. Baronet to move?

Sir J. D. REES: It is early to move. I have made my objection.

Major GRAY: The right hon. Gentleman's speech has left an impression upon my mind of very considerable relief. It encourages the hope that the great work of national education will not be unduly thrown back and the educational fabric will not be seriously impaired, notwithstanding the difficult financial conditions through which the country is passing. But I must not spend time on mere generalities. There are a few practical questions to which I am anxious to refer. I believe every teacher in the country will concur in the view that the head teachers of schools should take a large part in the actual work of teaching. That is a proposition from which no one will dissent. But when the right hon. Gentleman goes on to say the head teacher shall accept responsibility for a class, that is a totally different matter. It will be practically impossible for a school of 250 to be conducted satisfactorily, when the staff of assistants may be of a very poor quality indeed, if the head teacher, who ought to be supervising the work of unsatisfactory assistants, is tied down to the work of one class. The right hon. Gentleman should try to achieve his object, not by tying the teacher down to a class, but by a larger insistence on the head teacher taking an active part in the teaching work of every school, which is really a substantial difference. Everyone engaged in the work of education realises that in many a school there is no certificated assistant other than the head teacher, or there may be one, and then after the one certificated assistant you have the uncertificated and the supplementary teachers. The only qualification of many of the latter is that they are 18 years of age and have had some approval from the inspector, who could not get anything better. These supplementary teachers require constant supervision, for they may do more evil than good in a school unless they are carefully watched, and the head teacher cannot do that if he or she be tied down to the work of a particular class. I want to ask the right hon.
Gentleman to reconsider it, and also to reconsider the figure. I think 250 is far too high. It is the practice of some authorities to require responsibility where the school is one of 200. I think that is the case in the small schools in London. There it can be done, but to touch the figure of 230 or 240, I am afraid, will very seriously interfere with the efficiency of the school.
Again I agree with the right hon. Gentleman as to the desirability of inspection. The hon. Member (Mr. Hogge) recalled to my mind a scene I witnessed many years ago when the late Mr. A. J. Mundella stood at the Treasury Box submitting the Education Estimates for the year and gravely informed the House that the passes in arithmetic during the past year were 2 per cent, better than they were in the year before, that that was not very much, but that it was in the right direction. That was the estimate then, on examination in individual subjects, of the work of the inspector, and apparently the hon. Member is a survivor of those ancient days and would gladly revert to the system of inspection. I think he must be a solitary survivor, for there is hardly anyone engaged in educational work who would desire to go with him. The inspectors are necessary, but I totally disagree with the idea that it is necessary to duplicate inspection—that you should have one set of inspectors sent by the Board of Education and another sent by the local education authority. The poor teacher is worried to death. How can he serve two masters with different educational ideals? He can no more do it to-day than in biblical days. He is sure to offend one or the other. He generally succeeds in offending both. Some economy might be secured, some educational progress, some peace in the schools, if the duplication of inspection could be brought to an end. Inspection is necessary, but the inspector is not merely to be the ears and the eyes of the Board of Education. He ought to be very much more than that. He ought to be an expert adviser of the teachers in the schools, carrying from one place to another the best illustrations helpful to the teachers, and not merely a hostile critic.
I want to deal with one or two questions of wider public interest. It has been a great relief to me to hear that the Board will not propose to rigidly curtail the number of free places in secondary schools. One of the worst recom-
mendations of the Geddes Committee was the limitation of the opportunities for higher education for poor children. My right hon. Friend says he is anxious to have more rigid examination of the pupils who enter the secondary schools. I agree. Will he go so far as to exclude those who bring the fees and cannot bring the brains? I wish he would. If the Geddes Committee are of opinion that there are pupils admitted to secondary schools who will not profit thereby, they are not always those who come in with "free places." There are many of them who come with their parents' money and cannot bring the brains with them, and I hold that they are filling places in the schools which might be more profitably filled by those who have the brains but have not the money. Therefore let us carry this principle right through. There is a serious dearth of accommodation in the secondary schools. There is a waiting list in nearly every large town, and this is going to be a very serious problem indeed. A child of 12, 13 or 14 has won a scholarship and cannot find a place. Months are passing and years slip by. The child has lost an opportunity for life, and I know full well what will be the attitude of that child through life and how bitterly he will criticise a state of society which left him a hewer of wood and a drawer of water when he might have filled, with profit to himself and the State, a higher position. The chance is lost because we are driven at present to limit the accommodation which the schools can offer. But if it be necessary to limit the accommodation, surely every place which exists, or which can be made, should be used to the very best advantage.
What about children who come into the secondary schools under the age of 10 or 11 and hold places which ought to be filled by boys of 13, 14, 15 or 16 years of age? One of the right hon. Gentleman's own secretaries in years gone by wrote, in a preface to the Regulations for Secondary Schools, that this admission of children to secondary schools under the age of 10 was a concession to social prejudice. I am not having any of that. I detest these concessions to social prejudice. What the country wants is the best brains of every child, whether rich or poor. Here are children going into the schools, filling places, using up teachers'
time, spending national money, and but for this social prejudice the proper place for these children would be in the nearest public elementary school, and it would be a very great advantage to the State in years to come if the child of the rich and the child of the poor rub shoulder to shoulder in the public elementary schools, where they can now receive a thoroughly sound and clean education. There may have been some excuse in the days gone by, but the establishment of a school medical service has removed all that excuse. Let the right hon. Gentleman discourage the admission of children of tender years to the secondary schools. Let him not limit the possibilities for advancement to the children of the rich.
In this connection, may I draw special attention to a circular recently issued by him with regard to maintenance grants for children attending central schools. I have grave doubt whether ho is not acting ultra vires. Indeed, I have very grave doubt whether the attitude of the Board in saying "we will recognise this expenditure, we will not recognise that," is not altogether illegal. Take this particular case of maintenance grants. Under the Education Act of 1907 the local education authority was empowered to provide scholarships to children attending these schools, and under the Act of 1918, Section 24, the authority was empowered to grant maintenance allowances. Clearly, therefore, it is within the power of the local authorities to do this. But it is further provided by Section 44 that the Board of Education, not "may," but "shall," pay grants in respect of money lawfully expended by the local authority. Surely this money is lawfully expended. I hold that this expenditure on maintenance grants to children attending these central schools is lawfully incurred and ought to be met by a 50 per cent, contribution from the Board of Education. But I leave aside the question of legality, and ask the Committee to consider the facts. These central schools provide a course of instruction for children between 12 and 16. They are very largely secondary in their type. They are designed to fit a child of the age of 16 to enter the field of commerce or of industry. Some of them have a distinct industrial bias, others have a distinct commercial bias. They are always full. The demand for them is great. They were brought into being by
petitions from the trade unions and borough councils of London. They have amply justified their existence. The parents of a number of children who come forward for admission to these schools are too poor to keep them there for the whole four years. They are willing to make great sacrifices, to give up the wage-earning of the child, and to strive to maintain the child to the age of 16; but they cannot manage it altogether, and we in London have been in the habit of making a small grant to the parents of these children to enable them to take up their scholarships and to attend these schools. What has been the result? We have found that the children in receipt of maintenance grants are able to remain in the schools 10 months longer than the children who do not receive the grant. Ten months in a period of four years is a pretty considerable fraction of the child's school course. This system has obviously justified itself. If we continue to carry on this work in London the whole of the cost is to be thrown upon the ratepayers. I hope that London will shoulder the burden rather than let the children starve educationally. This is being done in the interests of economy, but I see no national economy if the burden be thrown upon the ratepayer instead of upon the taxpayer. It reduces somewhat the Estimate that comes before this House. It is a few thousands of pounds.
I am not alone in making this protest, I hold in my hand a protest from 28 local education authorities against this action of the Board of Education, authorities like Bristol, Manchester, and some of the largest towns, Durham County, small and large communities, all protesting against this particular step of the Board in excluding from the possibility of advancement some of the children of the poor. The rich man's child suffers no loss under the Geddes Committee Report. The rich man's child suffers no loss under the action of the Board of Education. The whole of the losses will fall upon the children of the poor. I cannot resist the conclusion, and I do not think anyone can, that the children of the poor' will contribute in the future to national prosperity, if properly nurtured in their youth, as fully as the children of the rich. If the whole of our educational work were a charitable action, if it were an ordinary family domestic arrangement, I could understand the withdrawal of State
grants altogether; but the whole raison d'etre of State grants is the future of our country, the training of these children as citizens, as competent skilled workers in industry and commerce. I wish that some of those who carp at the expenditure of national money upon education had the ghost of an idea of what the aim of the school of to-day really is. If they think that we are merely training the children in advanced mathematics or intricate problems of arithmetic, or even struggling to master the complications of English spelling, they have a wrong conception of the aims of the schools. The really strong, powerful, skilful teacher has citizenship and life's duties before his mind always, and it is that for which we bring the children into the schools, and for which we train our teachers and try to pay them adequate salaries. It is to save the State, and not to confer a benefit upon any individual. This Committee and the country will never realise the full merit of national expenditure upon education until it understands the objects for which that money is being spent.
I know that my right hon. Friend the President of the Board of Education feels as strongly as any man on this subject. It would be seriously to misjudge him if I did not attach value to the past record of his work, and to the wonderful awakening that he has caused throughout the country on behalf of national education. I sympathise with him in the period of difficulty through which he has passed, and if I deplore some of his actions, or protest against them now, may I ask him to believe that it is not in any spirit of condemnation, but in order that I may encourage him to persevere in the great work which he has undertaken. I have many opportunities of ascertaining public opinion. I am not referring to the opinion of teachers, although I do not regard that as valueless, but to opinion that is gathered up and down the country at the many public meetings which I address on popular education, and I am absolutely convinced that if my right hon. Friend will go lull steam ahead with this work he will hive practically the whole population of he country behind him. There is nothing which appeals to an audience, whether it be in Grimsby, in Bradford, in the south-west of England, or elsewhere, so much as the upbringing of the children of the State with a view to increasing our national prosperity.
There is another side of the picture to which I feel driven to draw attention, although I do it with very great reluctance. I noticed that my right hon. Friend referred to the fact that there were repairs to school buildings long overdue, and that it was our duty to safeguard the health and physical condition of the children attending the schools. On a previous occasion I have drawn the attention of the Committee to the fact that there are village schools in this country in such an insanitary condition that they ought to be closed forthwith, and that it is nothing short of criminal to compel children to attend such schools. It must not be forgotten that if a parent refuses to send a child to school, even if the school be insanitary, there is prosecution and penalty. I am determined in some way or another to get public attention directed to this matter, because I am quite sure that if the facts are known the public will insist on the Board taking action, however stringent the financial conditions may be. I heard my right hon. Friend the Member for the City of London (Sir F. Banbury) ask who was to pay.

Sir F. BANBURY: I said, "Where is the money coming from."

Major GRAY: That is the sort of remark one constantly hears. I am certain that my right hon. Friend would never send a child of his own into buildings of this sort. He would never allow a relative of his to be compelled to send a child to a school of this character. I will say more, for there is a soft side in his character, though it is not often disclosed here, and that is if he knew the facts as they exist at this moment, he would be among the first to support me in the appeal that I am making. I will give a few instances. At a Market Bosworth Rural Council meeting a report was read respecting the insanitary condition of a school. I am prepared to give names, if necessary. The medical officer reported:
To be realised fully it must be seen, but I seriously doubt if more wretched and insanitary accommodation could be found in a school outside Soviet Russia. The whole place is most insanitary and is a direct menace to the health of the children, and I would ask the Council to issue a closing Order to take effect immediately. This course with regard to a school is, I am aware, an unusual one, but in the circumstances it is justifiable and necessary, as it
appears that the authorities responsible will do nothing to remedy this appalling condition of things, which is not only a disgrace to them, but to civilisation itself.
That is a Leicestershire school to which children are compelled to go. In November last I drew the attention of the President of the Board of Education to this case. He said the Board were aware of it, that they had been aware for some time that the premises were unsatisfactory, and that he was making immediate inquiries into the matter. I have never heard the result of those inquiries. I will give a Wiltshire case. I do so hesitatingly. I am prepared for full catechism in regard to these cases if I am pressed. I have a hundred of them, more or less bad. Here is an official report for which I can vouch. It is a report made in May, 1921, upon a school in Wiltshire:
The condition of the offices was in-sanitary and offensive; two offices for 125 hoys, and four for 111 girls and 40 infants. The receptacles overflowing, floors flooded. The drain from the urinal runs direct into a watercourse at the bottom of the garden. The contents of the offices are placed on a large mound in a field 40 feet from the nearest class-room window.
On the day of that Report there were 25 cartloads on the mound. Is that sanitary? Is it a fit place to bring children to live there?
The schoolmaster's house sanitation causes offensive odours, as the pit is only a few feet distant from the yard used by the infant children.
7.0. P.M.
I telegraphed there this week to know what has been going on, and I find that the condition of things continues, that a scheme has been approved which will probably cost £700, that there is no earthly probability of getting the money, that the school is to remain open in the meantime. I have dozens of these cases, where there is no water supply whatever laid on to the school building, no separate accommodation for the teachers, although there are men and women on the staff of the schools. I have one case where the sole accommodation for the teaching staff is in the boys' offices, and there are women on the staff. Some of these cases have been known to the Board of Education for 20 years. I have called attention to them. I have one case where nine inspectors in succession have reported, but nothing has been done. The Church catechism has been the most expensive item in the educational system of this country.
Here is the case of a headmistress. I know the facts are correct, because 1 would not quote one until I had fully investigated it, and my right hon. Friend knows by whom some of the investigations have been made. Here is a school where the private and only road to the Church vicarage and infants' school was opened up for the purpose of laying on water to the vicarage. The pipe passed the school-yard gate, but it was not taken in to the school. The roadway has never been made up since. It is many inches deep in mud in winter. The children enter school in a fearful state. The playground is worse. The leaves from half-a-dozen trees remaining on the ground become a sodden mass, stopping all the drains. The children's offices are deplorable. There is no lavatory accommodation Slates are off, and The school wall for the teachers, gutter-pipes down. The school wall is now falling. Dampness is penetrating walls, and plaster falling off. The apparatus put in cupboards becomes mouldy and rusty. Windows have been broken for nearly two years, and have paper pasted over the holes. These children are to be brought up to lead decent lives in their cottage homes after that! Here is a little touch which, though homely, I think will appeal to some of us:
The class-room door cannot be opened from the inside as our experiment with a nail and a piece of string on one side with a hairpin through the broken handle on the other docs not answer.
They cannot even get the money to repair the door handle, and that goes on for months!

Mr. MACQUISTEN: Why does not the teacher mend it himself?

Major GRAY: Would you have her repair the windows, the walls——

Mr. MACQUISTEN: Certainly! It is a poor sort that cannot.

Major GRAY: Rather than submit to that, I think the wiser course would be for the teachers to leave the school. I think these are very heartless interruptions. Hero are men and women who have slaved in these schools, loyal to their church beyond a loyalty I can comprehend, who have slaved on year after year, and can you wonder they complain?
One man who sent me one of these reports has lost since Christmas one of his own children through throat disease and had another down with diphtheria. Medical men say it is entirely due to the insanitary condition of the premises. In another case, the only supply of water for school children is from a well which was condemned by medical authorities six years ago as impure. No accommodation for women teachers! We entice girls from good homes to spend four or five years in a good secondary school to train as teachers; we send them through the training colleges where they have many of the refinements of life; then they are appointed to some of these village schools, and are denied the common decencies of life. No financial stringency will justify a continuation of this sort of thing. I do not know how many cases there are. I know the Board has many a record of them, because they have beer, going on for years. Here is a school where an order has just been served on it for closing. I am told it will not be closed. Managers will not part with it. There are over 200 children in it. It is a church school. Only 12 families out of the whole lot go to church, the remainder go to chapel. There it is. The buildings are Crown property. If ultimately the local authorities persist in refusing to maintain the buildings they will revert to the Crown, and I trust they will transfer them to the local authority, and the condition of things will improve.
This is going on in village after village, and the children there have as much right to the common decencies of life as the child in the large town which is well provided. They have a right also to the sympathies of this House, and the right hon. Gentleman must not plead financial stringency as an excuse for allowing this to go on. This House will not much longer tolerate the denominational difficulty as an excuse for this. [HON. MEMBERS: "This House will stand anything!"] I do not think Parliament will long tolerate conditions of this sort. I have been into some of these schools. I have stood on the floor of a village school, and have had to shift my position because of the rain pouring through the roof. No money for repairs! I have the record of a school here—an infants' department. On four successive days in this last January what was the temperature of the room into which the
little infants of six or seven years of age went? At nine o'clock the temperature did not exceed 36 degrees Fahrenheit. At 10 o'clock it had reached 38 degrees, and in the two departments of that school on only one half-day throughout the whole of that month did the temperature reach 54 degrees. It is atrocious to keep little children of six and seven years of age shuddering in the bitter cold under compulsion. Who is it that cannot afford the money to get them more than three oil stoves to heat two huge rooms? I do desire, not in the interests of teachers—because they can move—but in the interests of the children who, under our law, are compelled to attend school, that the Board of Education should take most energetic measures, either to secure the adequate repair or the complete abolition of buildings which have no right to be called schools because they are rather death-traps for the children who attend them.

Mr. MARRIOTT: I feel it exceedingly difficult to follow my hon. and gallant Friend who has just sat down because he has made a speech which has visibly, and very properly, impressed the greater part of the Committee. I am sure he will forgive me and will allow me to say—in fact, I think he would be among the first to emphasise the fact—that there is some little lack of perspective in the picture he has put before the Committee. What I mean is that he has selected, very properly from his own point of view in order to make that impression on the Committee which he obviously has made, certain instances which undoubtedly bear a minute relation to the whole of our education system. [HON. MEMBERS: No!"]

Major GRAY: May I explain that in my speech I recognised the limits of time, and throughout the whole of my statement remembered that they that be whole need not a physician, but the sick.

Mr. MARRIOTT: That is a sentiment to which I should take no exception, but I still maintain that if my hon. and gallant Friend suggests that the picture he has drawn is a picture which is true of the educational machinery of this country as a whole, he has put it in totally false perspective. I do not for an instant deny the accuracy of every case he has brought
to the attention of the Committee, and I should be the very last person, as I think he would know, to defend any of these cases on their merits, but I do suggest that when we are discussing the Education Estimates for the year some sense of proportion and perspective should be maintained. After all, we are being asked to vote to-night the English and Welsh proportion of a total sum of, I think, £88,000,000. I hope very much that some portion of that £88,000,000, for I do not want to add to it, will be devoted to putting right the abuses which my hon. and gallant Friend has brought very properly to the notice of the House? Then I want to say just a word or two in regard to the speech of the hon. Baronet the Member for East Nottingham (Sir J. D. Rees), to whom the House always listens with such fascination. I hope that the five years or more which I have spent in this House will at any rate have obliterated some of the worst of the features of the University education which I enjoyed, but the hon. Baronet has taken exception to the spending of public money on ex-service men who have been sent to be educated at the University. Here, again, I do not for a moment deny that there are some cases in which that money has been very ill-spent. I admit there are such cases, but on the whole that was part of the debt which we owed to the ex-service man, and I think it is a debt which has not been too-amply repaid. I now pass to the substance of the speech which was addressed to the Committee earlier in the afternoon by my right hon. Friend the President of the Board of Education. I am sure I am only speaking the sentiments of the whole Committee when I say that we listened to that speech as regards form if not substance with almost unqualified delight. [HON. MEMBERS: "No!"]
First, may I point out to the Committee a matter on which I think all parties may presumably be brought to agreement, that is with regard to the form of the Estimates presented to us. We do want to be in a position in this House, when we are called upon to Vote large sums of public money, really to understand what we are voting them for. The form of the Estimates which are presented to the House do not invariably convey that impression to the duller-minded among us, like myself. It is very difficult to put together from these
Estimates the real aggregate cost of education in this country. One of the reasons is an obvious one, and is that in regard to services like that of education we only have before us a portion of the aggregate expenditure, only that which comes from the Vote of this House and is made good out of the taxes. Here, in passing, I would like to be allowed to express my gratitude to the President of the Board and to the Board of Education for the admirable memorandum with which they have provided us. But, of course, it is the Estimates which we are voting and not the memorandum, although the memorandum does help us to some extent to understand the position very much more fully than otherwise we should do. Take the question of the cost of administration, which will occur to many as an illustration. In the Estimates it is put down as £461,000 for headquarters' administration of the Board of Education, and £382,000 for inspections and examination, but if we are talking of the cost of educational administration of the country we must remember that we are dealing in these Estimates with only a fraction of that cost. Those figures are altogether exclusive of the cost of administration of the local authorities, which last year amounted not to £461,000, but to £2,814,000, and that figure is, again, exclusive of a further sum of £10,399,000 for rent, rates, taxes, insurance, fuel, light, cleaning, caretakers' wages, repairs to buildings, etc. I wish that a little of that £10,000,000 may be spared for the cases referred to by my hon. and gallant Friend.
That is my first point in regard to the machinery of these Estimates, which I admit it is very difficult to remedy, but that brings me to express my complete concurrence with the opinions expressed by the Geddes Committee on a point cognate to this. I notice that the Geddes Committee is not in fashion when the House of Commons is discussing questions of education, but I would suggest that they have brought forcibly to the attention of the House and of the country what is a very serious aspect of our expenditure on social service. It is this. They say in their Report:
There is one factor in administration which in our opinion has materially affected' the cost to the taxpayer and that is the
development of the percentage grant system. This system, which is common to education and public health services, has also been extensively applied in other Departments. Where in 1913–14 fixed or per capita grants were in force they now have been largely replaced by percentage grants while new grants introduced since that date have almost invariably been on the latter basis. Percentages vary from 20 per cent, to 75 per cent., the most frequent figure being 50 per cent. The advantage "—
as they go on to say—
gained from the percentage system is that it provides a stimulus to local authorities to improve the efficiency of the service. In fact"—
this is the point I want to impress—
it is a money-spending device. The vice of the percentage grant system is that the local authority which alone can really practice economy in these matters, loses most of the incentive to reduce expenditure, especially when the larger proportion is paid by the taxpayer out of the Exchequer. The deciding voice as to what money shall be spent is not that of the Government of the House of Commons, but that of the local authorities.
And they conclude, and I express my concurrence with them:
We consider that the percentage grant should be abandoned in the interests of economy and be replaced by fixed grants or by grants based on some definite unit.
I now pass to the Estimates as a whole. I find that the total estimated cost of education, including Scotland, which is nearly £13,000,000, is £88,000,000, of which sum £52,000,000 will be contributed by the State and the remainder by the local authorities. When I first attempted to call the attention of the House to the Report of the Geddes Committee—it was on the Debate on the Address—I addressed a warning to those who are zealous, as I claim to be myself, for education, that if they put themselves in an attitude of mere negation or pure resistance to the proposals of the Geddes Committee they might provoke such a reaction as would inflict great damage on the cause of public education. That appeal, which 1 made in all sincerity, has brought a considerable storm of criticism on my devoted head, but I feel convinced that my warning was amply justified. Only last month the National Union of Teachers issued, not a public but a private memorandum, but these private memoranda somehow find their way into the letter
bags of Members of Parliament. It is headed:
Memorandum for letters to Members of Parliament. The terms to be varied by each correspondent in his own style.
I can only say that my correspondents on the question have been very numerous and that they have varied the terms in their own style, but this memorandum has brought upon me and, I imagine, most other Members of the House, an avalanche of correspondence. Last week there was, as the Committee probably know, a conference of this very highly-organised trade union at Torquay, and an address was delivered to that conference by the president of the National Union of Teachers, in which he permitted himself to speak of the Report of the Geddes Committee in the following terms:
Its pages reveal a spirit of callous indifference towards the needs of young life—
[HON. MEMBERS: "Hear, hear!"] I was quite prepared for that cheer. I got a similar cheer yesterday when I referred to the description as callous of people who desired the emigration of the best of our people.
Under the guise of economy the Committee are attempting to destroy our educational system. The Report embodies the hopes and the philosophy of our social and political reactionaries. The Report cares little for human values or for the agencies that create these values. The complete cynicism of the successful buccaneer"—
is that Sir Eric Geddes or his companions?—
is written across its pages. They"—
that is, the teachers—
would never agree to any cut upon salaries paid under the guise of contribution towards pension," etc.
The Committee may have noticed that that presidential address has evoked expressions of deep regret from some of the best educationists in this country. Within the last few days there have been two letters addressed to the "Times" by men who have held the very highest position in our educational system. One was sent by Bishop Welldon, Dean of Durham. [HON. MEMBERS: "Oh!"] I do not know why hon. Members should groan at the mention of the name of a man who has been one of the really successful teachers in this country, at least as successful as some of my other
hon. Friend opposite in the teaching profession. The other came from the pen of Sir Alfred Hopkinson, at one time the revered head and, I believe, the first Vice-Chancellor of the University of Manchester, for some years head of the Owens College in that city, a man whose repute among educationists is second to that of hardly anyone in this country. Precisely the reaction which I ventured some weeks ago to predict in this case is revealed in the letters to which I refer. Dean Welldon asks:
Does this presidential address represent the true spirit of the National Union of Teachers?
I think that probably there are present in this Committee men who have belonged to that union. I wish that they would tell us, and I ask the question in all sincerity and with real concern for the future of national education in this country, if that address does really represent the true spirit of the National Union of Teachers?
Is it"—
he goes on to ask—
the demand of the Union that every department of public life should be subject to economy except that of the teaching profession? Does the National Union of Teachers dispute the urgent need of economy as a means of reviving and expanding the industries which ministers to the prosperity, indeed to the very existence of the nation?
Then Sir Alfred Hopkinson put a question which I will put to every Member of this Committee, particularly to my hon. Friends opposite:
Docs any reasonable being honestly believe that the Members of the Geddes Committee who gave their arduous services to the country voluntarily, were really actuated by a desire to destroy our educational system under the guise of economy? Do they really honestly believe that that was the underlying motive of the Geddes Committee?

Mr. R. RICHARDSON: They want to curtail.

Mr. MARRIOTT: That is the imputation of a wholly unworthy motive. I am not here to maintain the verbal inspiration of the Geddes Report, or to suggest that in regard to education everyone of its recommendations ought to be adopted. My point is, that if you have, as hon. Members have, a real zeal for public education, you can do no greater disservice to the cause of public education
than to put yourself in a position of antagonism to all suggestions for national economy. I pass very naturally from that to what is, I admit, a very delicate question. I mean that part of our expenditure which is responsible, I understand, for 70 per cent, of the total expenditure we are asked to vote to-night. I refer to the remuneration of the teachers. I take it that in every quarter of this House it will be acknowledged that before the War the teachers in our elementary schools were grossly underpaid. Certainly that is a point which I desire to emphasise. Then came the Burnham Committee. I understand from the President of the Board of Education that 65 per cent, of the local education authorities have adopted one of the scales recommended by the Burnham Committee. What is the broad result of the adoption of those recommendations? The broad result is that whereas before the War the average salary of a teacher in our elementary schools was £104 a year, the average salary to-day is £241 a year. The cost of teaching per unit of average attendance' in the last year before the War was 60s. 10d. It has gone up in the last year to 166s. There were further provisions in the recommendations of the Burnham Report that the scale, which was to come into effective operation on 1st April, 1921, was to be maintained in operation till 1923, and in some cases till 1925, but was then to be subject to revision only, as I understand, in an upward direction.
I suggest that the Burnham Committee was somewhat over hasty, both in its investigations and recommendations. I remember my right hon. Friend the President of the Board of Education saying in 1918 that there could be no greater danger to the State than a discontented body of teachers, and I agreed with him. It was probably in something of the panic engendered by that remark that the Burnham Committee did its work. I have said that there is no question as to the inadequacy of the salaries before the War, and I want also to say that there can be no question either of going back on existing contracts made with the teachers. The State must honour and the local authorities must honour any obligations that they have incurred, but that does not preclude the possibility of a revision of contracts in future. In particular I draw attention to two items. One
is that this year the provision for pensions will amount to nearly £2,000,000, and it is estimated by the Geddes Committee that in future the State will have to bear a burden of £10,000,000 a year for pensions alone. The other item is in regard to training colleges. I think the cost of training teachers, not wholly in training colleges, but mostly in training colleges, for England and Wales is put down at £1,150,000 a year. When we are considering the remuneration of teachers in the elementary schools, we must remember that the teachers have been almost entirely educated at the expense of the community. In regard to training colleges, I shall make what I am afraid will be a rather bold suggestion. I would like to see them disappear altogether.

Sir P. MAGNUS: Hear, hear!

Mr. MARRIOTT: I am glad to have elicited that cheer from one of the most respected educationists in the House. I would like to see the State rely for its supply of teachers on the open market.

Mr. MORGAN JONES: What does the hon. Member mean by the open market?

Mr. MARRIOTT: I mean that, in seeking for teachers for elementary schools, the State should get them in exactly the same way that you get teachers for the public schools or any other schools or for the universities—that they should go into the open market for them, instead of training them specifically for service in the elementary schools.

Mr. M. JONES: Does the hon. Member imply that thereby there is to be no special training for purely educational or teaching purposes?

Mr. MARRIOTT: If my hon. Friend will permit me to continue my argument he will see what I mean to imply. My objection to these training colleges is based mainly upon two grounds. First of all, I object very strongly to professional segregation. I want to see teachers educated with people who are not destined to become teachers. I do not want the segregation of teachers any more than the segregation of clergymen. I object to seminaries for the training of clergymen. Then again I object to something which I think is implied in the term "training college." It seems
to me to suggest a false perspective and a mistaken ideal of education. When we are educating teachers, as when we are educating other people, I do not want to suggest the idea that education consists of the infusion of a given set of facts. I am sorry that the hon. Baronet who sits for East Nottingham (Sir J. D. Rees) has disappeared. I do not wonder, but still I am sorry. I am sorry, because I noticed that in his speech a few weeks ago he expressed the opinion that he owed nothing whatever to education. I must say that the hon. Baronet was either exceptionally unfortunate or exceptionally ungrateful or— and I think this is the probable explanation—he was so exceptionally endowed with natural ability that education could add very little to it.
I hear from many sides of this House and elsewhere some such expressions in regard to early educational training as this: "I have forgotten everything I learned at school." I do not very much mind if they have, because it is not the object of education to fit people out with facts applicable to all circumstances. I was wholly in sympahty with my hon. and gallant Friend who spoke last as to the general purpose of training and education; that is to say, we have to remember that we are not training our young citizens for specific occupations in life; we are not training them to be teachers or to be clerks or to be grocers or to be soldiers, or to be clergymen or anything else. I want primarily to teach them and to train them to be citizens, to take their place in the economy of the State. If we had boundless money I would not grudge one farthing of it that was spent on education, but once more I appeal to those who have the interests of education at heart not to prejudice those interests by putting themselves into a position of antagonism to necessary and inevitable economy.

Mr. ERNEST EVANS: The hon. Baronet the Member for East Nottingham (Sir J. D. Rees) said that it took a period of five years for a man to get rid of the effects of university education. When I listened to him I wondered how long it took to get rid of the effects of life in India, because if there is one class of men who should be the last to disparage
the effect of university education it is that class of men who have had the experience of the hon. Baronet in India. I approach this subject from an entirely different angle. He is often the happiest man in life who, when things are not going well, can comfort himself with the reflection that, bad though things are, they might be worse. I am afraid there are many men like myself, interested in education, who have to fall back on that kind of philosophy at present when we are dealing with the policy which the Minister has been reluctantly compelled to accept in many directions. Reference has been made to the findings of the Geddes Committee. It may be that the members of that Committee look back with pride upon a good deal of their work, and I think they are entitled to do so; but I honestly believe that if there is one part of their Report, and work more than another upon which they should look back with misgiving, if not with shame, it is that part of their Report which deals with the subject of education. They have not been good enough to favour us with the evidence or the reasons which have led them to their melancholy conclusions, and it is therefore rather difficult to criticise them. But anybody who has read that part of the Geddes Committee's Report will agree, I am sure, that it is not only unsatisfactory but unsatisfying, because it does not enable us to judge of the reasons which prompted the decisions. When we read that Report and then hear the policy which the Government, at the instigation of the President of the Board of Education, has adopted, we can at any rate console ourselves with the reflection that things might have been worse in other circumstances and under other conditions.
I wish now to refer more particularly to some practical matters affecting education in Wales. Wales, I may be forgiven for saying, has always occupied a distinguished and honourable position in its efforts on behalf of education. Recently there was published as a Command Paper the report of the Board of Education under the Welsh Intermediate Education Act, and I must say that there are some parts of that report of a most disquieting character. I am not going to elaborate the points in any detail, but I wish to refer to two or three of them. First, there is the physical
condition of some of the secondary schools in Wales. Attention is drawn in the report to evidence which was given with regard to overcrowding, and apart from that it appears there is also evidence regarding the unsatisfactory way in which some of the schools are maintained. An hon. Member has already brought forward several very striking cases of the existence of this sore of thing in England, but he, as I understand, was referring to non-provided schools, and if that is the case I would ask my right hon. Friend to take drastic steps, and where that sort of thing is happening in such schools to withdraw the grant immediately until those responsible for the schools put them in proper order. In connection with this report dealing with intermediate schools in Wales, I would ask the Parliamentary Secretary to the Board of Education, who has done so much for education in Wales, to direct his attention to this point, and to go further into the evidence upon which the findings in the report have been based. In paragraph 12, page 9, of the report, there is another matter to which I would draw attention and which comes under the heading of "Language Teaching." It is a very grave disappointment to read that
The reports of the examiners of the Central Welsh Board on the work done in Welsh in 1920 contained comments that were of a very disquieting nature, but the strictures passed by the chief examiner in English of the work in English in 1921 are even more disquieting.
It is indeed a sad reflection on the-condition of intermediate education in Wales if the examiners can, in two successive years, make serious strictures upon the teaching in the one year of Welsh and in the other year of English. I think everybody will agree with me that there is no possibility of children getting education in the true sense of the word, unless they are enabled to delve into the treasures of literature, and they will never be able to understand literature and its beauties unless they first of all understand the language in which the literature is written. It is of the utmost importance in Wales that the teaching of English should be improved, and that there should be removed from it the strictures contained in this Report. I would also beg of the Parliamentary Secretary to see that, coupled with improvement in English, there should be an improvement in the
teaching of Welsh in order that the children of our own country may be able to appreciate and benefit from our own literature and language. I have had experience, even within recent weeks, as well as my experience when I was at an intermediate school in Wales, of what can be done in the promotion of real knowledge both of Welsh and English literature by enthusiastic teaching. I have come across two or three cases where a great deal has been done in that direction, and in view of what is contained in this Report, I earnestly beg the Parliamentary Secretary to devote a good deal of attention to the statements contained in the Report. I happened quite recently to be listening to a sermon, in the course of which the preacher was imagining what sort of replies would be given by the representatives of different nationalities to the question: "Who are the great men of your nation?" He went through a long series and finished up like this: "The Welshman, if he has not got a hero of his own, will probably say that it is Welsh blood in some great man which has made him great, such as Oliver Cromwell." That particular preacher knew enough of Wales to have been able to mention a good many great men. I am not at all sure that there is not some ground for fearing that outside political life—where everybody in Wales has a hero—there is a danger of the present generation in Wales not being as well-informed as they should be either in the language or the history of their country. I have read this Report with the gravest misgiving and I beg of my hon. Friend the Parliamentary Secretary to give it attention in the near future.
In saying this, I should be very sorry if it should be thought that I was bringing a general accusation against intermediate education in Wales. I am very far indeed from either doing so or desiring to do so. I know the great work which has been done by the schools. I believe they are carried on efficiently, and they are carried on, according to this report, at a less cost per unit than is the case with the secondary schools in England. I do not wish to bring any sweeping accusation against them, but I hope this report will not be shelved without being closely followed up. My hon. Friend knows well that there has been for generations a great enthusiasm for education in Wales. That enthusiasm still exists and his efforts
should be not to check it, but to direct it into the proper channels. Passing from Wales, I would wish to make one or two references of a more general nature with regard to the question of economy. I have never taken up the line that there should not in any circumstances be some reduction in expenditure on education. I am quite prepared to support a reduction in expenditure on education provided it can be shown that wasteful expenditure is reduced, and that our economical longings and yearnings are being directed to education last rather than first, as I am afraid a good many people wish to do. I was glad to hear the references of the President of the Board of Education to that part of the Geddes Report, which suggests that the compulsory age limit should be raised to six. Personally, I have never regarded this as primarily an educational question. I think the Government were well advised in turning down the proposal, but I would venture to press the President of the Board of Education at the same time to see if economies cannot be effected by ensuring that for these classes there shall not be employed highly trained and highly paid teachers when the work can be done equally well, if not better by other people possessed of the necessary qualifications. I am glad to know that he is inquiring into this matter.
In regard to the cost of administration, I cannot honestly say I found the speech of the right hon. Gentleman completely convincing. I agree with him as to the necessity of inspection, but I think in the present condition of finance he should see whether it is not possible to avoid some of the duplication of inspection, which is a pain and a trial to the teacher and from which, I very much doubt, if results are produced comparable to the expense as well as the annoyance which it involves. There are also small formalities with which teachers have to comply under Regulations issued by the Board of Education and the local education authorities, which are really a trial to them and which might be dispensed with. I think the right hon. Gentleman could take a little risk in this respect at the present time, because, as he knows, we have to-day a much better class of teacher than we had years ago. When the public system of education was started there was great need for
inspection and for careful and close scrutiny. There is still need for the work of the inspectors, but I think the right hon. Gentleman could afford to take a little risk in view of the great improvement in the class of the men and the women who are adopting the teaching profession. There is another matter in regard to which I agree a monetary economy cannot be achieved, but in which an educational economy can be achieved, and that is in the more careful scrutiny of the children admitted to the secondary schools. I know it is extraordinarily difficult, but I hope the right hon. Gentleman will try to ensure, as far as possible, that money is not wasted upon giving a secondary education to children, whether they be rich or poor, whether they be paid for by their parents or not, who are not going to benefit from that education. Coupled with that—and this is one of the difficulties which has been pointed out—he should be very cautious before he withdraws any facilities which enable poor children to proceed from elementary schools to secondary schools, and from secondary schools to universities. I have had experience in Wales of boys and girls who would never have been able, apart from the public system, to receive any great measure of education, but who, by reason of the education which they did receive with that assistance—and at the cost of tremendous sacrifices on the part of their parents—have come out with credit, not only to their schools and colleges, but with credit to the country to which they belong.
I happened to read in the paper this morning that there are in the Zoo birds which are said to mew like cats. I know there are many in this House and outside who are watching the President of the Board of Education with all the solicitude of a cat watching a bird upon which she hopes shortly to jump, but while the right hon. Gentleman has cats in his garden, he also has birds. I would like to be counted among the birds who are willing to comfort and encourage him, and although I have ventured to address one or two mild criticisms, I hope he will recognise that I am not even one of the birds which mew like cats. In spite of all that has been said, I believe the right hon. Gentleman has a great record to his credit since he first occupied the position which he now holds. He has
shown himself a great educationalist. I wish he would also, from now on, try to show himself also, in an even larger degree than he has already done, a great administrator, in order to ensure that as far as the administration of his office is concerned, there can be no room for the charge of waste which is brought against him. In that way he will avert from his Department that suspicion, which is perhaps more general than he realises, and the existence of which at the present time, is unfortunately threatening to deprive him of the opportunity of carrying out his great ideals.

8.0 P.M.

Mr. THOMAS DAVIES (Cirencester): I want to refer to two matters which were very briefly touched upon by the President of the Board of Education. In one case the intimation is that before long, by its own weight, the dual system of elementary schools must in some shape or form come to an end, and that view was also taken by the hon. and gallant Member for Accrington (Major Gray). At the present moment there is a great feeling amongst the teachers that the profession is not an open one, that, while they all have a certificate given to them by the Government of the country, their treatment in the schools of the country is not at all alike. There are, roughly speaking, about 21,000 elementary schools in England and Wales, of which number rather more than 12,000 are denominational schools—those which belong to the Church of England and the Roman Catholic Church—and those 12,000 odd schools are absolutely closed, as far as headships are concerned, to Nonconformists. When you consider that Nonconformists have to go through the same training as the others do, that they have the same certificates, and that they are of equal ability, bringing forward equal results, these teachers feel that it is not fair that this is the only public service in this country in which their religion debars them from obtaining certain posts. That is one of the results of the dual system, and one of the things we want to do is to see whether it is not possible to bring the dual system to an end on terms that are equally fair and honourable all the way round, so that teachers—never mind what their religion may be—shall have an
equal chance to all the posts in the national service of education.
The next point is this. Again connected with the schools, you will find that it is impossible, as the Board of Education has already found out, to carry into effect the Act of 1918, in two respects certainly. In the first respect, we are told that there should be continuation schools and secondly that there should be central schools. Let us see what the difficulties in the way of carrying out the continuation schools are at the present moment. If you have a country district of England, and especially in the south and in the west, you will find that the denominational schools are something in the proportion of three to one of the council schools. That does not hold good of the whole of the country, but it is so in the south and west. If you take the county from which I come, Gloucestershire, of which I have a very intimate knowledge, you will find that there are something like 390 schools, of which 300 are denominational schools; in fact, 298 are Church of England and two are Roman Catholic schools. In our small country parishes, these schools are almost entirely Church of England schools, and you have in many places schools with less than 20 pupils in attendance. I myself, in a district contained within four miles, found one day one school with 16 on the books, two miles away another school with 11 on the books, and two and a half miles from the latter a school with nine on the books. How are you going to provide continuation schools in a district like that? You must remember that as long as the school is sufficient for the number of children in that particular parish, you cannot call upon the managers of that school to enlarge it in order to form a continuation school for the district surrounding, neither can you legally ask the ratepayers to enlarge those schools, as long as they are voluntary schools, in order to make them large enough for continuation schools or central schools.
Further, when we remember that the Act contemplates that all children from the age of 14 who have not had a secondary education or who are not undergoing secondary education will have to go up to the age of 18 to a continuation school—a day school, mind you, not a night school—and put in 320 hours in instruction, which practically means two
days a week, just imagine the position of these schoolmistresses in the small country schools if they are going to have great lads there up to 18 years of age mixing with girls of 18. It would not be fit for the bigger people to go there, and it would be grossly unfit for the infants to be in the same school. Unless we can in some way do away with the dual system, and get all these schools under one authority, it is absolutely impossible to carry out the Act of 1918, and it is also quite true that a good deal of the money that is spent upon education is lost because we are not able to carry the education on in later years. If we are to get the full benefits of the Act, one of the first things that must be done is to concentrate those schools in the larger schools and see to it that facilities for education are brought home even in the most scattered country districts. The next point I want to call attention to is this, that the Minister of Education, speaking about a year ago, said we were paying an educational price for these religious difficulties, and the right hon. Gentleman then rightly asked, if that price was always to be paid. To-day we have heard him say himself that he thinks this dual school system will break down of its own weight. It seems to me that it would be very wise at the present time, instead of waiting until things come to a crisis, if the managers of the various denominational schools in the country would take counsel together and see if they could not come to some compromise, fair to all parties concerned, so as to abolish the dual system and have one national service right throughout.
The Minister of Education referred to the very high cost of special schools, such as those for the deaf, the dumb, and the blind. Unfortunately, that always will be so, but there is a class of school which costs even more than those, because if you take the figures which were given by the Minister himself in March last in this House, in reply to a question as to the cost, you will find that the average cost of a child who is in a school for mentally deficient or idiot children, or children who cannot avail themselves of the education given because of their defective brain power, is £95 per head per year. That is a very high price indeed, and the evil of the matter is this, that the number of those mentally defective,
or imbecile, or idiot children—call them what you will—increases very largely indeed, if you compare them with the other population. If you take the ordinary population, you will find that for every three increase in the ordinary population of the country, those who are mentally deficient are as five to three. In this country up to now we have had spasmodic efforts to inquire into these things and see whether some remedy could not be found, but in the United States of America they have gone into this thing very systematically and very thoroughly indeed, and they have found this out, that many of the criminal cases are not so because the criminals do it out of sheer cussedness, but because they have got taints in them of this imbecility or those kind of things. I very often feel that it is very hard lines that criminals should be punished for things for which really they are not morally or mentally responsible because of some taint they have got in their character through those who were their ancestors. I hold here a book called "The Measurement of Intelligence," written by one of the most eminent professors of education in the United States of America, a professor of education in the Leland Stanford University, which is one of the finest universities in the States, and this book has an introduction from a gentleman who is equally well known in English educational circles, namely, Professor Findlay, and he recommends this book to be read by all who are interested in education.
As a result of thorough psychological investigation into the cases of the inmates of reformatories and so forth in the United States we come across the following, and the book is full of similar paragraphs. At the State Reformatory, Jefferson, Indiana, a professor, in an unusually thorough psychological study of 1,000 young adult prisoners, found a proportion of feeble-minded in some shape or form not far from 50 per cent. They give case after case and figure after figure, but let me give one or two cases which have been thoroughly traced out. He says one Martin Kallikak was a youthful soldier in the revolutionary war. At a tavern frequented by the militia he met a feeble-minded girl, by whom he became the father of a feeble-minded son. In 1912 there were 480 known direct descendants of this temporary union. It is
known that 36 of these were illegitimate, that 33 were sexually immoral, that 24 were confirmed alcoholics, and that eight kept houses of ill-fame. The explanation of so much immorality will be obvious when it is stated that of the 480 descendants, 143 were known to be feeble-minded, and that many of the others were of questionable mentality. This was not owing to the father, because he married a respectable girl afterwards and brought up a large family, and out of all their descendants there is not a single sign of any of these things I have mentioned. Now I come to another case. We find here a family called the Nam family, whoso whole history has been thoroughly gone into, and that of their descendants. They give equally dark pictures as regards criminality, licentiousness, and alcoholism, and although feeble-minded-ness was not as fully investigated in these families as in the Kallikaks, the evidence is strong that it was a leading trait. The 784 Nams who were traced included 187 alcoholics, 232 women and 199 men known to be licentious, and 40 who became prisoners. It is estimated that these cases have already cost the State nearly one and a quarter millions of dollars.
It seems to me that we now should take some steps to set up a Committee of this House to inquire into these cases and see whether some means cannot be found to keep them in check. When I spoke of this question of education when the Estimates were up before, I asked the Minister whether he could not see his way to have a Committee to go into this matter.

It being a quarter-past Eight of the Clock, and there being Private Business set down by direction of the Chairman of Ways and Means under Standing Order No. 8, further Proceeding was postponed without Question put.

Orders of the Day — PRIVATE BUSINESS.

Staffordshire Potteries Water Bill (by Order),

Consideration, as amended, deferred till Thursday, 11th May.

Jarrow Extension and Improvement Bill (by Order),

Second Reading deferred till Tomorrow.

Orders of the Day — SUPPLY.

Again considered in Committee.

[Mr. JAMES HOPE in the Chair.]

Postponed Proceeding resumed on Question,
That a sum, not exceeding £27,900,000, be granted to His Majesty, to complete the sum necessary to defray the Charge which will come in course of payment during the year ending on the 31st day of March, 1923, for the Salaries and Expenses of the Board of Education, and of the various Establishments connected therewith, including sundry Grants-in-Aid.

Question again proposed.

Mr. T. DAVIES: In the Edinburgh "Quarterly Review" for January, there is a very able paper, written by one of the greatest authorities, I suppose, on these mental questions in the Kingdom, Sir Archdall Reid, and it refers to this question very much in the same terms as does this gentleman in the States, from whose book I have been quoting. He also says that there is only one remedy for this kind of thing, and that palliatives are no good at all. In his very last words he says:
I believe that the method indicated in these pages, the sterilisation of the natural defective, is the only practical remedy.
It is a very strong order to ask the Minister of Education to sterilise all those who are supposed to be mentally deficient, but I do ask that a Committee should be set up in connection with the Ministry of Health as well as the Board of Education. In my own county we have flatly refused to take up the charge of these feebleminded. Although we have been told it is our duty under the Act—as it is—we found the cost so excessive, running into many thousands of pounds, that we absolutely refused to take it up. The consequence is that these girls are living at home. Sir Archdall Reid gives the case of one mentally defective girl who had 11 illegitimate children. These will go on breeding like rabbits. Unless something is done, we shall be a nation in which the majority are defective before another 100 years have passed over our heads. Therefore, I do urge that the Ministry of Health and the Board of Education should see if they cannot set up a Commission to go into the whole thing, remembering that in 15 of the United States of America they have put in force the sterilising of
members of both sexes with the greatest possible benefit.

Dr. ADDISON: I am sure that many Members feel a large measure of sympathy with the President of the Board of Education in his difficulties, but we should watch with some amazement his efforts, if he attemptel to adopt the prescription of my hon. Friend who has just sat down. I shall wait to see what response my right hon. Friend makes to this courageous invitation. In the meantime, I will turn to what, I think, are more, practical questions. Several time* during this discussion reference has been made—and very justly—to the real personal enthusiasm of my right hon. Friend the President of the Board of Education. I think I can say, without revealing any official secrets, there was a time when some of us made the suggestion—in fact I made it myself—that it was time we had somebody at the Board of Education who knew something about education. The result was that my right hon. Friend was invited to occupy that post. He does not occupy a very enviable position at the present time, and I am sure he will acquit me of any desire to add to his difficulties by any criticisms I want to make. But, after all, the subject is beyond the question of his good intentions. The matter before us is, What does the. Government propose to do I In the first place, generally speaking, I welcome his suggested scheme of dealing with grants—I will not say the specific form. It has been clear for some years past that some simplification of the grant system was inevitable, and, indeed, necessary. The percentage system tended sometimes to stereotype methods, left insufficient room for local initiative, and was, I fear, very often at the same time an incentive to extravagance. I should like to ask my right hon. Friend two or three questions. I understand that one of the economies proposed is the closing of a certain number of small schools. I wonder where those small schools are.

Mr. FISHER: I am afraid I cannot have made myself clear. What I said was that the Geddes Committee desired to strengthen the Board's hands with a view of enabling them to close small schools, but the Government were unable to accept that suggestion for various reasons, and I am afraid we shall be able to do practically nothing in that respect.

Dr. ADDISON: I thought my right hon. Friend, in referring to the administration economies, classified that as one.

Mr. FISHER: No.

Dr. ADDISON: I must have misunderstood the right hon. Gentleman. One recognises his difficulties with the smaller schools, but there is no question that the state of many of our schools, especially in country districts, is a disgrace to our educational system. Many of them are grossly overcrowded. Many of them are in a very unsatisfactory condition, considering the number of children that attend them. The right hon. Gentleman's difficulty is that the schools are vested in an authority over which he has no control. It arises out of the system which was set up some years ago, and I know that various methods have been devised for removing the obstacles to unification, which is necessary for improving this class of schools. The fact is, the managers of these voluntary schools in these days have not got the funds, and the buildings get more and more derelict, though the managers are often as anxious as my right hon. Friend to improve the buildings. I do hope he will not allow considerations of economy to prevent his using his best efforts to help those who are seeking to find a way out of this difficulty. I am not going into any details to-day, but he ought not, on the ground of economy, to diminish his efforts to promote a settlement which will bring an end to this lamentable system—I mean, lamentable to a large number of old country schools. This matter cannot be escaped from by either party.
The Committee will turn to the Memorandum of the Board of Education and they will see that in it there are two or three very striking features. There are two items in which there are small increases and others where considerable saving is suggested. It is on these latter I wish to speak for two or three minutes in particular, and I desire to ask some questions. It will be observed that the Special Services Estimate is reduced from £4,154,000 to £3,400,000—nearly 20 per cent. Further we find that Administrative and other expenditure is reduced from £13,000,000 to £12,000,000—about 10 per cent. There is a big reduction in the proportion of grant for the Special Services expenditure. What is that expenditure? We see below (page 4) that it is,
school medical service, provision of meals, special schools for defective children, organisation of physical training, evening play centres, and nursery schools. The grants for these services are to be cut down 20 per cent. I regard that as—and I say it without any disrespect to my right hon. Friend—as a most discreditable proposal. If it were shown that there is real waste in any of these services, then of course cut it down, but my right hon. Friend did not suggest that as a reason—because he cannot.

Mr. FISHER: May I point out to my right hon. Friend that out of the total saving of £754,000 on special services there is to be a saving of £730,000 due to the limitation of grants for the provision of meals, leaving, therefore, the saving to be. effected on all the other branches of the special services of only £24,000. It appears to me that the Special Services get off very lightly, practically with a reduction of £24,000.

Dr. ADDISON: I was coming to that in my very next sentence. What I want to do is to bring the Committee to ask how this will be brought about? It will be brought about, as the right hon. Gentleman has reminded us, by a reduction of £730,000 on the provision of meals. How are these children fed? How does it come about that in the elementary schools the children are fed at all? What is the process? The children are observed, in the first place, or are known to the teachers, and the entrants undergo, I think, a medical examination—a matter which has not been mentioned at all. We have at the present time about half a million of children certified to be suffering from mal-nutrition. If the teachers or officers set apart for the purpose are satisfied that the children really need meals they are given a ticket, or marshalled at dinner time and taken to the place where meals are provided. Very often they are provided in buildings attached to the schools, or buildings close at hand. In any case, as a rule, the education authority make the arrangements. It is part of the routine of the day in connection with these children who nerd meals. What is going to happen to those children?
If it were suggested that last year or the year before so many hundred thousand children have been picked out otherwise than as they are, and by some mere
casual application of somebody outside, not by the people who know them in the schools and who know the circumstances—if I say it were suggested that 600,000, or 100,000, or 200,000 children last year or the year before have been regularly fed who ought not to have been fed, or who could afford to pay for their meals, or who were not hungry; if it had been suggested that there was waste or maladministration, that would be a different matter. That is not suggested. I think the right hon. Gentleman does not suggest that?

Mr. FISHER: I do. My point is that I am very doubtful as to whether these grants are in effect properly administered. I have, of course, no objection to necessitous cases being fed. It is also possible that there has been no maladministration. I do not say there has been. I do not know. But I am very uneasy at this very large expenditure which I cannot adequately control or justify to this House on the Education Vote.

Dr. ADDISON: I cannot understand my right hon. Friend's argument. I could understand it perfectly if he applied it to the whole of the services. There might then have been a good deal to be said for it; or that the matter should be under the Poor Law guardians or the district council. Half a dozen suggestions might be made on that point. They are quite arguable. But such suggestions do not apply to the mere arbitrary cutting down of £730,000. How is it arrived at?

Mr. FISHER: I have explained that. As I have explained, one of the main objects of the Provision of Meals Act was to enable children who travel some distance to school to obtain meals at school, and it was expected that in these cases the children would be able to pay the cost of the meals, apart, of course, from necessitous children. For these we are taking the normal expenditure in times of no great wave of unemployment.

Mr. MILLS: Pre-War?

Mr. FISHER: Higher than pre-War. We have made, I think, liberal allowance. It is higher than any expenditure before 1920–1921.

Dr. ADDISON: With great respect to my right hon. Friend there is something
which is of greater importance in this matter than his Vote, and that ie what are these children going to do? This is not a proposal to put the amount on to some other Vote, but an arbitrary figure is taken. The real reason was that stated by my right hon. Friend with his customary frankness—an educational reason. What is going to happen as the result of it is this: the education authority, when it happens to be in a poor district, will have to take its share of the grant—no doubt special allowance will be made—but in the main the grant will have to be made on a population basis. Having done that the district will have to be rationed and make the best of it, and in the poor district the ration will be less than now. To ration these children in these particular localities, and to give the simplest kind of mid-day meal at a time like this is a big problem. You are going to make this reduction on the ground of economy. That is not going to be an economy, and I claim that it has no relation to education. You are going to have a much more wasteful system established or else the children are going hungry. One of those two things must inevitably arise in every poor district. What happens now? The children are known individually to the teachers who select them and give them the ticket to go to have a meal. In future the number of children who can get these tickets will be limited either by so many days a week or to so many children just as the amount of cash will provide. The result will be that there will have to be applications to the guardians in respect of some of these children and they will have to set up a mid-day feeding centre.

Mr. FISHER: I expressly said that we contemplate that the local education authority will make the necessary arrangements for the meals at the schools, and the service will be such as they are able to provide. The only question is from what source the meals are to be financed, and I suggest that the cost of the meals should not be borne on the Education Vote.

Dr. ADDISON: I am not satisfied with that. I had a great deal to do with the initial organisation of this system, and I know the reasons why the school authorities undertook this work. A whole
series of administrative conundrums presented themselves, and the result was that in course of time we came to the conclusion that the only people to have charge of this business were those who knew all about the children and who could pick them out. If you like to say that two-thirds of this charge shall be taken off the Board of Education Vote and put on to the Ministry of Health Vote, or the general rate of the local authority or anything else, that would meet the case from your point of view, it might be fair, but by this proposal you are simply slicing off £730,000 from this particular service without a vestige of suggestion as to what is to be done in place of it. It is an utterly indefensible proposition, and I am sure my right hon. Friend cannot maintain it for three months. It cannot be worked in that way. The proper way is to say that a certain percentage of it is not an educational charge and should be allotted to some other Vote, but simply to cut it off and make no other proposal in its place is an improper and discreditable suggestion. I am most disappointed with this proposal, and I hope my right hon. Friend will set to work to think out some way of avoiding this method.
I want the House to recognise that £750,000 on this service is the biggest cut in the whole Vote, and nine-tenths of the economy is to be made at the expense of the poor children's stomachs. I sincerely hope that the Committee will express its disapproval of this proposal which I think is most unfortunate. The other suggestions on Special Services really amount to this, that you are simply marking time. Personally I am glad that the right hon. Gentleman is not going to cut these services any more. The hon. Member who spoke last and those acquainted with our school system know that what my right hon. Friend has described as a revolution in the health of our children has been brought about by this system of services, and the general scheme under medical inspection of clinics and all the rest of it, and this has brought about in the health of the children better results during the last 20 years than almost all our other Acts dealing with the physique of the children. That is much more important than any amount of school work. I am still quite unorthodox in that respect. I believe it is much more important that a child between
the age of six and nine should have its body kept in a good condition, and for this reason I am thankful that there are no other serious diminutions of these services. I do not want to make my right hon. Friend's task more difficult than it otherwise would be in that respect, but if you want to improve the efficiency of the British nation that is the worst place to begin, and the history of the last twenty years has illustrated this to the most convinced apostle of anti-waste.
There is one other feature which calls for comment. I am not quite clear as to what my right hon. Friend proposes to do in regard to the size of classes. I gather that he wishes to keep things from getting worse, and that is what it practically amounts to.

Mr. FISHER: Yes.

Dr. ADDISON: With that assurance from the right hon. Gentleman, I can say we are glad it is no worse. Then I come to the question of secondary schools. I am glad my right hon. Friend has been able to withstand some of the clamour which arose in consequence of the Geddes Report, because although it is, and must be, true that there are a large number of children who are sent to a school who are not intellectually capable of making the best use of the education given—and that must be the experience of all actively interested in education—there are still vast numbers of children outside these schools who cannot be squeezed in at all as things are, and they would immensely benefit by the secondary education if they could have it. I am glad to find that the numbers of these schools are not going to be reduced. It appears to me, however, that the day continuation school movement, a movement for the improvement, training, and education of adolescents, is in abeyance. If there is one thing my right hon. Friend stands for in British education, it is the education of adolescents.

Mr. FISHER: Hear, hear!

Dr. ADDISON: I am glad to hear that cheer. I honour my right hon. Friend for it. I think he himself must feel the greatest possible disappointment that in the year 1922 an Act which was passed in the year 1918 to give this education is in abeyance, and that facilities for the training of adolescents are being withheld. Most of us will agree that one
learns more at the age of 15 or 16 years than for years previously.

Mr. FISHER: The number of pupils in grant-aided secondary schools has been doubled.

Dr. ADDISON: But I am speaking of the day continuation schools, in regard to which there is practically no advance, nor are we encouraged to look for any in the near future. If there was one thing those of us who were behind the scenes found during the War, it was that we were very short of trained ability in young people. In every direction that fact cropped up. Whatever the crisis with which we were confronted, we always found ourselves short of people who had been trained in their youth, and we had to fall back on those who were gravely handicapped by that lack of training. We do hope that that training will be forthcoming in the future' and that there will be real instruction in the various technical, scientific, industrial and other spheres. I know it is of no use pressing my right hon. Friend to tell us anything as to the likelihood of progress in the future, but I do want to point out that the absence of these day continuation schools is a great defect in our educational system at the present time, and will remain a most serious defect until we make arrangements adaptable to provide for the training of adolescents according to their capacity. No one expects that all children will be able to take advantage of this continuation training, but the nation will be enriched eventually by a- system of this kind. I hope, therefore, that all interested in education will do what they can to support the right hon. Gentleman, first in resisting any reduction in secondary education, and secondly whenever the opportunity occurs in promoting as far as he can some modicum at any rate of the continuation system of education of which we stand so sorely in need.

Sir MARTIN CONWAY: I listened, as did the Committee, with attention, interest and sympathy to the lucid explanation and complicated figures presented by my right hon. Friend in his statement, and I realised that minute criticism of details on a large and intricate subject like this is of very little use. Our educational system is not a system of recent manufacture; it is one which has gradually grown up. It has spread in many directions, it is complicated, and,
on the whole, it has been enormously advantageous to the health and welfare of the people of this country. At the present time we are faced with the necessity for national economy on an unprecedented scale, and it is reasonable to consider that every branch of our national activities must submit to some retrenchment. Unfortunately we are not in the same position as the individual who has to retrench his personal expenditure. We have never been told what is the total revenue that this country can afford to raise, but if we did know the total amount beyond which we might not healthily go, but up to which we might healthily rise, we could decide that this or some other branch of our national activities should suffer retrenchment until the general expenditure was brought down within the national income. If we knew that, it would be the desire of everyone that where retrenchment was necessary we should make it, not at the expense of the young, but of the old. If we have to retrench, if we have to give up useful activity, if we are obliged not to spend money in many directions in which we would like to spend it, surely one would say that, whatever else we gave up, the expenditure on the education of the young should be the last branch of national expenditure on which we ought to retrench. Granted that we have to cut our expenditure to the bone, I would say, cut it to the bone first of all in matters relating to old people rather than to children. Let the children, be the last to be penalised. That is the general attitude in which I, for one, should approach the question of educational economics.
The use of the word "education" has come to be almost a superstition. We talk of education as though everyone knew what we meant. The sort of idea that is prevalent is that if you have a man or a woman whom you call a teacher, if you have a building which you call a school, and if you have children, and put the children into the school in the presence of the teacher, you get education, and that the more of these schools you have, and the more of these people called teachers, so much the more you have of education. That is entirely fallacious. There is a great deal more than that in education. Teachers, for instance, can-
not be created in unlimited numbers. The teacher is born, and not made. In this country there only exists a certain definite number—one cannot say how many—of people who are born teachers; and by no process can that number be increased. There is a sort of idea that, if you take ordinary intelligent young persons, put them through an establishment called a training college, pass them through all sorts of examinations, and bring them out with a certificate, you get teachers; and that you can secure that those teachers shall do the work that teachers ought to do by putting them into a kind of harness, as though it were to a cart, and driving them along a fixed road. You inspect them at particular definite intervals, you give them a curriculum which they are to follow, and then, it is thought, you have got an educational machine into one end of which you can push the children of the country, and, by grinding the handle, get out at the other end educated people.
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That is an entirely false idea. You have to find your teachers by some system, and I dare say the Board of Education does operate as well as one can, in this imperfect world, expect it to operate in searching for teachers. The assumption is that you find them; the assumption is that the people you put into schools to teach your children are, in fact, teachers. You have to go on that assumption. Then, I would say, treat them accordingly. How would you treat the ideal teacher? If you are to make them ideal teachers, you must treat them as such, and the way to do that is to give them freedom and confidence. But you do nothing of the kind. You are all the time inspecting them, and reporting on them, and going to look into them, and opening the watch to sees how the works are going. All that has one tendency, and one tendency only, and it is to make a good teacher into a bad one, and not to make a bad teacher into a good one. All of us who have had to pass through that ghastly thing which we call education, and who look back upon those dark days when we were pupils in schools, may ask ourselves how many teachers did any of us come in contact with in that time? Personally, from the age of ten to the age of one-and-twenty, I encountered three, and those three taught me everything I ever knew, all the
rest being absolute futilities. I am afraid that that is a very common experience. I hope it is less common in our day than it used to be more years ago than I care to count. Let me urge that, broadly speaking, the first thing is to put confidence in the teacher; and the second thing is to put confidence in the local authority. The local authority knows more about the needs of the locality than any central board can, and all of us who have had experience of local authorities know how keen they are, in the main, on doing their work well. You put your teacher in a school and inspect him, and then, in a sense, you inspect your local authority; but why should you not inspect the Board of Education? There must be an end to it somewhere. Should not the end be at the beginning? Why not give more freedom and more confidence, in the hope that, broadly speaking, good results will come, and, indeed, better results in proportion as you give this freedom and confidence?
To turn to a different question, everyone desires that what has been called a ladder should exist that will enable the humblest-born child in this country to reach the highest education that it is possible to attain; that is to say, that every child born with a mind capable of being developed to the highest degree should be able to accomplish that development with all the assistance that educational institutions can give. That does not mean to say that everyone is to be educated beyond a certain point. It is not, in fact, a ladder that we want from the lowest slum to the highest university honour. What we want is a sieve, so that we may be quite sure that not a grain is kept above the sieve that can get through it, and that not a grain large enough to remain in the top of the sieve gets lost. We want to sift the millions of children born in this country, to discover, to isolate, to bring out, to help in every way, all the finest ability in the country, and allow none of it to escape. If you succeed in getting that, you get really all that is required, because the number of really able and most highly developed and educated people that are wanted will never be many. You cannot give occupation to too many. I rather doubt whether in the past there has ever been much difficulty in genius emerging from the crowd. In the Middle Ages, for
instance, you will find amongst the Lord Chancellors, or their equivalent in those days, peasant-born children who grew and developed and reached the highest position in the land. It has never been impossible, but it ought to be easy. There ought to be no impediment whatever in the way of rising from the bottom to the top. You do not, however, want to waste education, as we often see it wasted, upon uneducable material. I am not speaking now of the working classes at all. I am speaking of boys—there are heaps of them—who have had quantities of education wholly wasted upon them. It is as true in one rank of life as in any other. You can waste education in the most appalling manner, and I have not the least doubt that of the £88,000,000 which we are spending this year, a considerable fraction—I do not care to guess how much—will be wasted in attempting to give education to uneducable material.
There is a final point I should like to suggest for consideration. The normal development of the individual from the embryo stage to that of a grown man follows the general line of development of the human race. The human race in developing from the monkey and pre-monkey stage up to the present semi-civilised condition of man followed a certain line of development, and that line of development, broadly speaking, is followed by every individual human being between the embryo stage and the stage of fully-developed man. I suggest that we might take a lesson from nature and see whether our educational system ought not more or less to follow the analogy which nature shows us in developing our physical form. Man, if you go back in the past, learnt first of all to use flint implements. He improved his tools and developed his skill, and it was tens, and, possibly, hundreds of thousands of years from the time he first came into existence before he invented the alphabet. Mankind learnt skill first, and went to abstractions later on. He came to writing relatively late. He came to abstractions, such as arithmetic, mathematics, grammar, and all those things later, whereas in our system of education we go to work the other way about. We begin with abstractions, and we go on to the concrete later. We have been told today that the idea is to devote children up to the age of 11, plus—I suppose that means less than 12—to the three R's. I
suggest that that is an entirely unscientific method of education, and that the whole system of education is perhaps fundamentally and radically wrong, and that we ought to begin with rudimentary skill of hand before we attempt to supply abstract ideas to the brain.
What is the purpose of education? I have suggested that there are four principal factors in education—first, to build up a healthy body; secondly, to build up a sound character; thirdly, to provide skill of hand; and, fourthly, to instil knowledge. Knowledge is certainly the last of those four things that any child needs. Everyone needs a healthy body. Everyone needs a sound character. It is just as well for everyone to have skill of hand, but as for knowledge—what do any of us know? Therefore I hope some day there may be a possibility of entirely overhauling our system of education. Suppose you had two nations engaged in combat, in one of which every citizen possessed skill and in the other every citizen possessed knowledge. I am inclined to think the skilful nation would win. It would have been an immense advantage to me if I had learnt mathematics a little later and how to plane a deal board a little earlier. I think if skill of hand were an essential part of all education in public schools, and if you were taught vulgar fractions by sawing a board into halves, quarters, thirds and so on before you had to do it on a piece of paper, you would get a much more healthy population. We should have one thing in common, the whole lot of us, and that is skill of hand. We should have far more respect for each other's occupations if we all had that common foundation. I am hoping that some day our whole system of education may be revised in that sense, and along with that revision a considerable diminution in the cost of education might be brought about. The President of the Board of Education has the interests of education at heart and has worked as very few of us have been able to work for national education, and as things are to-day all I can say is that I support his proposals and hope they may work out to the public good.

Mr. TREVELYAN THOMSON: Without following the hon. Member who has delighted the Committee with his disquisition on education, I agree with him in the desire that local authorities should
have greater latitude with regard to the control of educational matters and in the emphasis that he laid on the need for a healthy body. I was rather surprised that he should end up by supporting the Minister in the reduction he is making in the grant to local authorities for the feeding of poor children, because this did not seem to have the logic which generally characterises his arguments. I am surprised also that with his desire that skill should be imparted at school and that children should learn vulgar fractions by sawing wood into various pieces, he is supporting the Minister in his desire to cut down the teachers in the elementary infant schools to those of less trained minds and training than you have at present, because if you are to have a skilled training it is not by cutting down the teachers who are dealing with the youngest children. In fact one rather imagines that the younger the child the more important it is to have a highly skilful technical teacher. It is much easier to teach an older child to learn things. I rose chiefly to ask the Parliamentary Secretary a question or two with regard to the position of local authorities and the economies which he suggests. We find in the White Paper which has been issued that, whereas the reduction in grant which the Board is making is nearly £3,000,000 to the local authorities—about £2,000,000 to elementary and £1,000,000 to higher education—on the next page but one we find that the economies which the local authorities are likely to accomplish during the coming year only total the sum of £967,000 as against £3,000,000 which is to be cut down in the way of grants. How is that £2,000,000 to be accounted for? Is the £2,000,000 of economy going to be an economy at the expense of the ratepayers to the satisfaction of the taxpayers? If that is so, I am afraid it is a very false economy and that you are placing the burden on the backs of those who are least able to bear it. This is a point which is exercising the minds of local authorities to a great extent.
The economies which the Minister suggests in his White Paper, 20 per cent, on special services and 9 per cent, in administration, are less than certain education authorities with which I am acquainted are already making in their Estimates for the coming year. The local authority on which I served for some
years in my constituency is making drastic cuts in their administration and maintenance expenses, cuts which are greater than those which the Minister suggests. Whereas the Minister suggests an economy of 9 per cent, in administration services that local authority is making a cut of 22 per cent., and whereas on special services the Minister foreshadows an economy of 20 per cent, my local authority is making a cut of 35 per cent. Notwithstanding these cuts, notwithstanding that many local authorities are doing what the Board suggests, they are likely to be in a, much worse position oven despite these reduced Estimates, because of the teachers' salaries on the Burnham scales, for which the Board is largely responsible and which they advised the local authorities to accept, otherwise the local authorities would have found themselves in a very awkward position. I know a local authority that refused to accept the Burnham scale, and the consequence was that they could not get their secondary schools adequately staffed. Because they refused to accept the scale and they were not adequately staffed the. Board has refused to give them the grants to which they would have been entitled for their higher educational service. Therefore, local authorities are not free agents in this matter. If they had not adopted the scale, their services would not have been efficient, and they would not have got; the grant which the Board have the power to grant or withhold.
I hope the right hon. Gentleman will be able to give some satisfaction to the local authorities. What is going to be their position if they carry out the economies which the Minister has foreshadowed, and yet, owing to the extra cost of the Burnham scale, their costs are higher? Owing to the adoption of the Burnham scale, the local authority in my constituency will have to meet an increase of 11 per cent, in teachers' salaries, and that 11 per cent, far outweighs any economies that you can get on maintenance or on special services or on administration. Therefore the net result is that their costs for the coming year are much in excess of last year's. How is this sum of £2,000,000 going to be saved? Who is going to bear it? Is it the case that some local authorities will get a bigger grant than last year and certain other authorities will get
less? What is the basis on which the grant is going to be made during the coming year? You have a somewhat elaborate formula for the calculation of the existing substantive grants, a formula made up of what is in effect a capitation grant of 36s. per child in average attendance, and then a percentage grant of three-fifths of the salaries of the teachers and 50 per cent, in regard to loans and administration expenses. Can the right hon. Gentleman tell the local authorities on what basis the grants are to be made in the coming year? Is the old formula which has been in force during the last two or three years to hold good? If so, I presume that certain local authorities who are carrying out the economies suggested will get the additional sum that will be provided under the grant. The matter is concerning local authorities very keenly, and they are anxious to know what their position will be in the coming year.
Then there is the question of grants given to necessitous areas. The Board has, during the last two or three years, raised the limit which qualifies for the receipt of the grant. When originally instituted, if the Education Bate was over 20d. in the £ the authority got what was known as the Necessitous Areas Grant. Last year I think it was raised to 40d., and this year it is 48d. in the £. To what extent is that grant benefiting local authorities, because there are comparatively few authorities whose Education Rate amounts to 4s. in the £? Is it not rather a fiction and a delusion to offer local authorities assistance if they reach an expenditure which it is almost impossible for them to reach? Can the right hon. Gentleman say how many local authorities during the forthcoming year will qualify through their rate of 4s. in the £ for educational purposes in order to receive the necessitous grant? A criticism was made by the hon. Member for Oxford (Mr. Marriott) as to the disadvantage of the percentage grant. He quoted the Geddes Committee in favour of abolishing the percentage grant, but he did not give any argument. He seemed to assume the percentage grant to be a grant by accident rather than by design, when, as a matter of fact, the Minister and the Committee well know that the present form of grant was designed particularly to assist areas where you have a big school population
and a low rateable value. You have extreme variations. The Education Authority in Middlesbrough had last year an education rate of 3s. 5½d., whereas a purely residential area like Bournemouth had an education rate of only 1s. 5½d., yet they are providing equally a national service. The cost of such education is essentially a national service. The responsibility is imposed by Parliament. The Board lays down lines on which local education authorities must act, and local authorities have practically no discretion with regard to expenditure. Take the question of teachers' salaries laid down by the Burnham scale. That is a national responsibility, fixed by the Board through the Burnham Committee, and it accounts this year for 78½ per cent, of the total rate in my town. That is fixed by Parliament, therefore it is only right that this should be a national burden. It is unfair that areas with a low rateable value and a big child population should have to bear through their rates charges which are more than double the charges in other parts of the country.
To-day the Minister is reducing the assistance in regard to school feeding, which will simply mean a transfer from the education authority to the board of guardians and add to the burden of the local ratepayers. You are, therefore, adding tremendously during the coming year to the charges which during the last year have been practically unbearable, from the point of view of the local authorities. Can the Minister tell us in what way the local authorities are going to make up the £2,000,000 loss which, he says in the White Paper, is to be granted to them during the next year? Can he say whether a local authority, provided that it carries out these economies in administration and special services which he foreshadows, will get the grant on the same basis and formula as it did last year? I will content myself with expressing the importance of industrial areas not being penalised, as foreshadowed in the White Paper, and I trust that when the hon. Gentleman comes to reply he will give an assurance that they will not be penalised, provided they carry out the Regulations as foreshadowed in this White Paper.

Mr. JOHN MURRAY: This is a Debate upon the Education Estimates. Therefore
one must reconcile oneself to the fact that there will be far more talk about Estimates than about education. True to the lesson of the series of speakers who have preceded me, I will begin by referring to a particular estimate regarding the city one division of which I represent, namely, a difficulty which has arisen in Leeds because of the action of the Board of Education with respect to the recognition for grant of advances made by the Leeds Education Authority to the teachers in October, 1920, and in April, 1921. The Leeds Education Authority, like the London Authority, desired to anticipate and arranged, the Board of Education taking no objection, so far as I know, to pay the carry-over to the teachers in two parts, 50 per cent, in October, 1920, and 50 per cent, in April, 1921. In doing so, they assumed, having no evidence or any reason to the contrary, that the Board of Education would recognise these payments for grant, but in January of this year the Board intimated that it would not recognise for grant the second 50 per cent., completing the whole increase, which they had paid since April of last year. I do not wish to go into the matter in more detail, but having mentioned it in this House I will wait and see what explanation the President of the Board of Education can give of the action of his Department in creating a situation in Leeds which has given much trouble and thought both to the teachers, the education authority, and the city council.
It is really very difficult in a debate of this sort to get away from money. The hon. Member for Camberwell (Mr. Ammon), at an earlier period of the Debate, rebuked the President of the Board of Education for having abandoned the idealism of his Oxford and Sheffield period, and for having come here an enemy of education. I wonder how much the hon. Member knows about Oxford, and the finances of Oxford, or the finances of Sheffield University either. From a long experience of Oxford University I can tell him that it is a place where there is never money enough for the work. Some experience of provincial Universities, not Sheffield, leaves me with a strong belief that the great difficulty in those Universities is the same, namely, that there is not enough money for the work. It is precisely the same position in which the Minister of Education finds
himself to-day in this House, namely, that there is no money for the work to be done. Consequently, for the hon. Member for Camberwell to blame the President of the Board of Education personally, as if it were his fault that there was no money, or that what there was was not being fully devoted to education, is merely to travesty the present situation.
I was much struck by what I heard of the speech of the hon. Baronet the Member for East Nottingham (Sir J. D. Rees) regarding what is called at the Board of Education the "O" Branch, namely, that Department which supervises the expenditure of the £8,000,000 which has been set aside, for the training of ex-service men. I noticed that the hon. Baronet, speaking in the best Balliol manner, though claiming not to be a university man, brought only general charges against the main idea and the detailed working of the scheme, and therefore I shall not enter into details in that matter. I will simply say that, as I was able to see the working of the scheme from several points of view, I found it promising, good, and not wasteful. I happened to go as a member of one of the Civilian Advisory Boards sent to the Army in 1919 to tell the young men of the facilities being provided for them, to advise them, and to make the arrangements by which they afterwards went to the colleges and institutions of their choice. No one who shared in that work could have helped being struck by the impression the scheme made on the Army, or the, attitude of the men in particular who wore going to he benefited, and who were crying out for something of the kind. Later, in Oxford, I saw some of these young men, the work they did, the spirit they put into it, and the satisfactoriness of the whole experiment. Later it was my privilege at the Board of Education to have something to do with the administration of the scheme, and if a general commendation based on experience from these points of view may be held to counteract to some extent the general charges of the hon. Baronet, I hope my commendation may be taken in that sense.
I was impressed with the. speech of the hon. Member for East Edinburgh (Mr. Hogge), who was all in favour of examination, although I do not agree with him quit?, in the way in which he put his points. He wanted to re-establish
the examination régime for the elementary school. I suggest, on the other hand, that while children are still at the proper age for elementary schooling such examinations as used to be carried out are wholly unsuitable, and, further, that his suggestion that the modern method of inspection is the opposite of examination simply defies the facts, because no inspector of the Board of Education is excluded by his regulations, or is discouraged by the Board, from examining anybody he likes. In fact, his method, in practice, consists of a skilful combination of inspection and examination. If the hon. Member for East Edinburgh means that in the later stages of education, the secondary stages, where you wish to be sure that boys or girls are really making some use of their opportunities, examinations ought to be imposed and re-imposed, then I agree entirely with him, and I regret the general tendency of the country at this time to suppose that at that age you can dispense with examination. I believe, whether you look to intellectual standards or to the bracing of the moral character of these children, examinations are good, because they are the epitome of life. We are always engaged in an examination, having to do the best we can on the spur of the moment without too careful preparation, which is precisely what an examination is.
I could not help observing one point of inconsistency in the speech of the hon. Member for East Edinburgh and in the very remarkable speech of the hon. and gallant Member for Accrington (Major Gray). The hon. Member for Central Edinburgh was sorry that so many Oxford men are included among the inspectors employed by the Board of Education. He thought these posts ought to be kept for the teachers themselves, whereas the hon. and gallant Member for Accrington was very anxious to have all classes of the population brought together in the same classes in school. I want to suggest that if we are to have any chance of reducing the social differences of the country by assimilation in the class-rooms we must be prepared to bring Oxford, or any other university of first standing, into close touch with the elementary teaching of the country, and one good way of doing that is by appointing a number of Oxford men to be inspectors of schools. Furthermore, I know a
number of cases of men appointed from Oxford in that way, and I remember two of them who were required to go and teach as a preliminary for a period in an elementary school in order to qualify to be inspectors. So far as the qualification of teachers goes, I think that there is no practical difficulty in getting Oxford or Cambridge men who are keen about the work of inspection to take the trouble to qualify themselves by previous teaching.
I was struck by the remarks of the hon. Member for Oxford City (Mr. Marriott) about training colleges. He was all for the abolition of training colleges, and requiring those who wished to take up the work of elementary teaching to take degrees in universities. I am all with him. In Scotland it is so, and in some other countries educationally in advance of this country on certain points. At the same time, though the proposal is educationally sound, it is extremely surprising to find it coming from the hon. Member, for this reason. At present, a man or woman can become an elementary teacher by going for two years to a training college. It polishes them off in two years. The period is rather short, but the process is completed in that period. If the training colleges were to be abolished, and a university training substituted, it would mean three years at a university and a fourth year of special training as a teacher. So the hon. Member, who has distinguished himself as an economist, is proposing, in reality, to double the cost of preparing elementary teachers for their work. Right educationally, but scarcely suitable, I think, for the hon. Member for Oxford City to utter at the present time.
The abolition of training colleges would be an extreme step. They have good qualities. They have an esprit de corps. They have a character of their own. They cultivate the social graces to some extent, and provide an opportunity for the humanities, which, without them, might be entirely lacking. But there is nothing to prevent the training colleges working in close co-operation with the universities. There is nothing to prevent the nearest university being well represented on the governing body of a training college. There is nothing to prevent university professors in the nearest town
doing the examining at these colleges. There is nothing to prevent students in the training colleges from attending classes and taking out studies at a neighbouring university. I believe that in Liverpool this system of co-operation between training colleges for elementary school teachers and local universities has been carried to a very laudable degree of closeness and perfection, and anything which the Board of Education could do to bring the training colleges into touch, as external or quasi-external bodies, with the nearest university would be for the good of the training colleges, and also for the good of the university.
One point more, a financial point. I am very much interested in a good many of the things which appear in these Estimates, new things in particular—those schemes of medical inspection, of which we have heard so much, which cost so little, which are an immense propaganda for medical care among a class of the population that never naturally think very much of those things; such studies as housecraft for girls, most of whom will have to live in homes, and for the promotion of handicraft among boys, most of whom will have to work with their hands, also because many girls have their intelligences best trained by housecraft or things allied with it, and still more because many boys have their intelligences best trained by handicraft or anything that goes with it and not by books or study of the ordinary kind. I put forward these points not as class points, but as education points, because housecraft and handicraft are intimately connected with the building up of intelligence and character in a certain large proportion of human beings.
I am very much interested also in the tutorial classes for working men which receive the admirable sum of £17,500 in the present Estimates. I am also interested in secondary schools. I think that the chief weakness of our educational system is the small volume of secondary teaching. I should like to see the State launching out into a large scheme of subvention for things like these, for the new things in education, many of the experimental things about which the nation at large has not yet quite made up its mind. I should like to see very large grants given to tutorial classes, and those other purposes, and why not now? The answer, of course, is
that at present the nation is extremely hard up, and, besides, the nation is already carrying through its central Government very heavy burdens on behalf of local education. I ask the Committee 'what should be the function of the State in defraying the cost of education?
We have slipped far too easily into supposing that, because the State is interested in having an educated proletariat, therefore it ought to pay wholly for that education. I doubt it. I think that the business of the State is, where there is a great venture that ought to be taken up and that will not be taken up well, advantageously, and hopefully without such action, it should take up that venture, but not that it should have to maintain that venture for ever. I want to ask this Committee and the nation, so far as I can reach it, does it really believe in the elementary education of the children of the poor? If so, then the localities should educate all their children because they believe in it, and not because they are compelled to do it or bribed to do it from here. I want the State to keep its money in reserve in order that it may subsidise and encourage the pioneer things, like tutorial classes for adults and secondary education, because secondary education is still a pioneer thing in this country, and I want the State to keep its money in reserve for another purpose—to afford special help to the poor districts.
At present practically all districts of the country get very much the same subvention towards the expenses of the primary education. I know that there is a little formula at the Board of Education. It is very involved, and I cannot write it down or explain it. I know that it makes a slight variation in the total grants according to the amount of money that is yielded by a given local rate. But I should be surprised if the President of the Board of Education would himself maintain that that differentiation between the poor and rich districts is anything like sufficient for the needs of the present day. The hon. Member for Camberwell (Mr. Ammon), I think it was, said that the cost of all primary education must be put upon the taxes, as the poor districts cannot pay. That cannot be done until the present system, which sends so much money down to defray the cost of elementary education in each district, is reformed The
business of the State is not to undertake for good and all the burden of elementary education. We have had elementary education since 1870. Why not make it compulsory, and cease to pay? Let the localities pay. Let the State subsidise by special grants the exceptionally poor districts, which will be in a minority. Let it pay nothing at all to the richer districts. Let it also subsidise by grants those newer and rather more expensive ventures indulged in by some local authorities and omitted by others which really mark out the lines of progress for the nation in education.

Mr. MORGAN JONES: I beg to move to reduce the Vote by £100.
I have listened with very great interest to the Debate, and I have observed that throughout, with one exception, not a single speaker has yet given expression to the demand which is latent outside for an examination, for the purpose of economy, of the expenditure upon education. I am not going to do it myself, but I think the fact I have stated is indicative of the lack of courage of those who criticise expenditure upon education, that they have not got up to give expression——

Sir F. BANBURY: We have not been called; you must wait.

Mr. M. JONES: I am sorry I forgot the right hon. Baronet, but I give him an opportunity of moving a reduction of the Vote by £100.

Sir F. BANBURY: I shall vote with you.

Mr. M. JONES: I move the reduction in order to call attention to certain items upon Vote number one. The economists in education are insistent that the time has come for cutting down our expenditure on education. We have heard a good deal to-day relative to some of the statements made by older critics of educational expenditure, but that ought not to deter us from making the point that when we consider educational expenditure we ought to consider it in the light of the England after 1918. In 1918 an Act was passed which sent a thrill of joy through every educational circle in the country. I can tell the right hon. Gentleman in charge of the Vote that the fact that the Act of 1918 has in some measure been laid aside, has, rightly or wrongly, brought his own name into some measure
of disrepute. Perhaps from some points of view that is unjustified, because there is not the faintest doubt, in my mind, anyhow, that if the right hon. Gentleman had his own way he would be glad to see all the provisions of the 1918 Act put into operation. I believe the right hon. Gentleman is still as keen upon educational reform as he was when that Act was passed. But the fact remains that this Act of Parliament, a sort of charter for the young of the country, is scrapped in the interests of what we call economy.
I will apply my mind to some of the lines along which economies are being proposed. Let me make one criticism, in the first place, as to the general outline of these Estimates. There is a division of expenditure under various heads, such as elementary and higher education. That presupposes an entirely wrong attitude concerning education. It has been accepted in this country, unfortunately, for too long. There is no justification at all for dividing education into elementary and secondary. The underlying conception of the definition is that elementary education is just good enough for a certain type of child drawn from a certain circle in society and that secondary and higher education are in the nature of things destined for those who belong to a totally different section of society. Fortunately, by the provision of certain scholarship schemes and so on, people who belong to what are called the lower orders are enabled to avail themselves of higher education. But the conception is there, and we ought to look forward to the time when we can entirely remove this unfortunate and entirely artificial barrier between the elementary school and the secondary school. I would be very glad indeed to see the whole scheme of scholarships, good as those scholarships are, utterly removed, and I would like to see it possible for the child of the elementary school who gives evidence of intellectual capacity, to go as easily from the elementary school to the secondary school as he goes from a fourth to a fifth or from a fifth to a sixth standard. A system which does not admit of that fails in its purpose.
One word by way of commendation of the statement of the right hon. Gentleman that he does not propose to economise upon the provision for physically and mentally defective children. I hope there
is some measure of substance in that promise. I can only say that I am obliged to feel a little doubtful about it, and for this reason: I happen to know that the Glamorgan Education Committee, of which I was a member last year, has placed proposals before the right hon. Gentleman for providing a school for blind children in that county. The Committee had the offer of a building at an extremely reasonable price, and yet on account of the campaign conducted in the country this institution has been allowed to pass, the Education Committee has not been allowed to buy it, and provision for blind children has not been made as adequate as it ought to be in Glamorganshire. If the right hon. Gentleman promises that applications such as that will from now on be favourably considered, I for one will be among the first to rejoice. I want to make one other protest concerning the most unsatisfactory statement as to the feeding of school children. I followed with the greatest possible keenness the statement made by the right hon. Gentleman. I ask frankly whether the right hon. Gentleman has yet made arrangements with the Ministry of Health or some other Departments to take over this particular work, for if no other Department is to take it over the only conclusion we can draw is that this particular activity is to be reduced to an absurd degree. I suspect I am correct in my assumption that the real objection to the feeding of school children arises from what happened last year in various industrial districts during the coal lock-out. I have not the faintest doubt in my mind that the objection is this—the Government have discovered that the putting into operation of the Act providing meals for necessitous school children strengthened the power of the working classes to maintain their opposition to the employers, and in order to deprive the working-class people of the power of resistance which they possessed in having their children saved from shortage of food, this privilege is to be taken away from education authorities. That is a most sinister move, and I tell the right hon. Gentleman quite frankly, if that is the move, it is one of the most unworthy moves I have observed made in this House since I came to it. [HON. MEMBERS: "An unworthy charge!"] I daresay it appears unworthy to hon. Members
opposite Still, I stick to it until it is formally denied
10.0 P.M.
I want to pass on to another question. [HON. MEMBERS: "Hear, hear!"] I am quite sure hon. Members opposite must feel a sense of relief. I pass on to the proposal to add to the size of the classes in elementary schools and I would like to invite the Committee to consider exactly what the enlargement of the classes to50 or 60 will mean. Let mc take the Committee for a moment to an elementary school where some new principle is being taught. [Interruption.] I am afraid I cannot make this sufficiently interesting to some hon. Members opposite, but I will make it clear to those hon. Members who are prepared to listen with some measure of decency and respect. The time for the lesson is reduced to half-an-hour. There are 60children in the class. It will take the teacher half that time to expound the principle and there is only a quarter of an hour left, and with 60 children that gives exactly a quarter of a minute for each student in the class. The tendency of education obviously should be to establish close contact between the teacher and the pupil, and unless that contact is developed and made more intense, obviously the effectiveness of the teacher is reduced. What, chance has a teacher to get even a full return of the labour he puts in when the number of separate individualities and separate personalities which he has to deal with in his class is increased to this extent? It reduces him from being a careful, clear-thinking teacher, applying himself to the mind of each separate child, and makes him a mere lecturer to children who cannot understand. That is where this proposal as to increasing the size of the class will fail. There are something like 2,500,000 young persons in this country between the ages of 14 and 18.Thereare6,000,000children in elementary schools, and of these only 270,000 over11 years of age pass into recognised secondary schools. Out of the 270,000 only 37,000 ultimately pass from the secondary schools into training colleges, and90percent, of the 2,500,000 children between 14 and 18 get no further education whatever. If we are to reduce the number of free placers or limit them to 25per cent, of the total number, obviously we are going to make
no effort whatever to bring secondary education to the vast proportion of these young people—the adolescents, to whom reference has been made earlier in the Debate. While there is that very large proportion excluded from the secondary schools there are 26,000 children under the age of 10 in State-aided secondary schools. If we ought to have economy, then I assert the time has come to remove these 26,000 children under the age of 10 from the secondary schools so as to provide 26,000 more places for children over 11who are capable of winning scholarships and ready to sit for scholarship examinations. Regarding training college accommodation, I have received "nee the last education Debate in this House, letters of two kinds from various young pupil teachers. One kind refers to the pupil teachers who have spent years at elementary schools, and have also spent year sat secondary schools, and who have come out possessing certificates such as those of the Welsh Central Board or the Oxford Senior or equivalent certificates, and who have been told on application to the training college authorities that because of the economy campaign there is not to be anyplace for them in the training colleges for the next two or three years. That is a terrible hardship upon young people who have fitted themselves, or hope to fit themselves, for the teaching profession. There is another type. There are the persons who have spent two years of training in the colleges, and are now being told by education authorities on making application for post sin the coming August, that places cannot be found. Their two years' training now turns out to be useless—temporarily, at any rate. They may havetowait12 months or two years—it depends on the financial condition of the country. These young people, at the most difficult time of their lives, find themselves unemployed, after having made serious financial sacrifices in order to fit themselves for the teaching profession. I suggest the economy campaign is being carried rather too far when it involves such young people in an injustice of this kind.
I want to make one or two references to the speech of the hon. Member for Oxford (Mr. Marriott), although I am sorry he is not here at the moment. He made references to the speech of my friend the President of the National
Union of Teachers at Torquay last week. I have not the right to speak for my friend, nor indeed ought I feel called upon to reply for him, as he is quite capable of looking after himself and will doubtless take an opportunity of replying in another place, but certain reflections were made on his speech, and some of us here, by our interruptions, appeared to agree with some of the strictures he made on the Geddes Report. It is because of that that I want to make some observations concerning the speech of the hon. Member for Oxford. Our objection to the Geddes Report is this. We feel that the Geddes Committee has betrayed, intentionally or otherwise, an obvious bias as against what are called the social services. If hon. Members will refresh their minds by re-reading that Report, they will find that it comes down with an extremely heavy hand indeed upon what it calls the social services, even in regard to education itself. Take the instance which I gave in the Debate on the last occasion, the instance of the Dartmouth cadets.
When the Geddes Report comes to discuss the reduction of expenditure upon these cadets it makes the suggestion that the £462 per head spent upon those cadets should be reduced by £150. Why by £150? So as to reduce them, they say, to the public schools' level. I have no objection to the public schools' level at all. Indeed, I should be very glad if the public schools' level became the general level of education throughout the country, but we object very seriously to the impertinent assumption that some children of this country are to have a public school educational standard and that other children are to be brought down and, indeed, to be grumbled at if they get a £12 10s. 6d. standard. That is our objection to the Geddes Report, and I have not yet heard in this House any adequate defence of the impertinent assumption that children of the people who do the hard toil in this country should be called upon to do without educational facilities that are granted, without question at all, to the children in other departments of life. I do not begrudge them education, far from it—I congratulate them upon the fact that they have got education, and I would be very glad to have it myself—but while granting it to them I assert, without fear of contradic-
tion that that right belongs to every child in this country, and it is because of the implied acceptance of that contrast in society by the Geddes Report that we make the strictures we do upon that Report.
I observed in the somewhat curious remarks of the hon. Member for West Leeds (Mr. J. Murray) that he is entirely in agreement with the habit of appointing Oxford people as inspectors of schools in this country. I have nothing to say about Oxford gentlemen as inspectors of schools, but I have this to say, that oftentimes Oxford gentlemen have no knowledge whatsoever about elementary schools—none whatsoever. They have never been there, they know nothing at all about it, except from books, and, as far as practical education is concerned, they know infinitely less than most of the teachers in the elementary schools; but in order to establish that contact between the universities and the elementary schools, I am willing to see some of the inspectorates allowed to Oxford men. I would, however, suggest a better thing to the hon. Member. Suppose we sent some of our elementary school teachers to Oxford and allowed them then, after having had the value of Oxford training, to qualify for inspectorships I Would not that be better? They would then have the value of this social distinction that Oxford confers upon them—[An HON. MEMBER: "And Cambridge!"]—and Cambridge too—with also the advantage of practical knowledge of elementary school work. I object to this assumption that people who belong to Oxford and Cambridge are the only people who are capable of judging what educational work in this country is. Throw it open to all, to people who have been trained in the schools as well as to the gentlemen who have been trained in the universities. Let me say quite frankly that I do not speak with any envy at all. I speak with no malice or bitterness at all. I would like to see a greater spirit of comradeship grow up between the people who attend normal colleges and those who attend the universities of the country. That is all I wish to say on this Vote. I object strongly to some of the economies that are involved in the Vote, and for that reason I move its reduction by £100.

Sir F. BANBURY: The hon. Member for Caerphilly (Mr. Morgan Jones) stated
that no one during this Debate had got up to urge economy in the expenditure proposed by the President of the Board of Education. That is true, but one of the reasons is that hon. Members who are in favour of expenditure on education have all spoken at such enormous length that it was almost impossible for anybody else to be able to interject a few sensible remarks on the side of economy. The hon. Gentleman is quite right. The majority of speakers this evening have given their views upon how it would be best to educate the children of this country, apparently under the delusion that the question of cost did not matter. That is not an unusual habit when Estimates are discussed in this House, whether for education or other things. The majority of Members of the present Parliament are no doubt sympathetic on platforms in favour of economy, but when Estimates come up they one and all have some reason for thinking that these special Estimates are good, and that there should be no economy, but that there should, on the contrary, be an increase, and as long as hon. Members have that opinion I am very much afraid that no economies of any real importance will be obtained. The time is so short—and I know the hon. Gentleman the Parliamentary Secretary wishes to reply—that I must cut my remarks equally short. Therefore, I will not attempt to discuss at any length the question as to whether or not the education which is given at the present moment to the children of the people who receive it: is doing any good. I very much doubt it, in view of the fact that a large number of people in this country must be manual workers. You cannot get over that. Everyone cannot have a black coat; everyone cannot sit on these green benches; nor can everyone have a sufficient income to be here, presuming he can get into this House. A very large number of people must exist by manual labour. It has been so from the beginning of the world, and it will go on until the end of the world, and it is no use giving people who have to exist by manual labour education which is only good for them when they become clerks in banks or offices, or Members of Parliament, or professors at Oxford, and people of that description. The world would come to an end if all that anybody had to do was to carry out what is learnt at the great public schools or universities.
What good, during the last few years, has this enormous increase in expenditure on education done? In 1919–20 the total expenditure from taxation for England and Wales was £32,757,000. Last year it was £51,000,000 and a few odd thousands, and this year it is £47,210,000. Have we benefited during those few years by this enormous increase of expenditure on education from £32,000,000 to £47,000,000? I do not think we have, and I do not think that anyone can show that we have. Unemployment has increased. In nearly every direction, we are worse off than three years ago, and yet my hon. Friends opposite think this enormous increase of expenditure ought to have made everyone prosperous. It has done nothing of the sort. Therefore, as we are in such straitened circumstances, I think the least we can do is to go back to the expenditure of 1919–20, namely, £32,700,000. I should like to ask my right hon. Friend a question as to finance. On page 7 of the Estimates the gross total expenditure is shown at £47,210,000, as against a total expenditure last year of £51,014,178. Now the reduction this year—and this is the point I want to make—is not £6,389,000, as stated here, but £3,800,000, which is the difference between £51,014,178 and £47,210,000. Supposing my income be £3,000 a year. [HON. MEMBERS: "Oh!"] Well, anything you like. Supposing it be £2,000 a year, and that I spend the £2,000 a year. Next year someone leaves me £500 in addition. I do not then say that my expenditure is £1,500 a year. It still remains at £2,000, and my right hon. Friend's expenditure still remains at £47,210,000. It is true he has got appropriations-in-aid of something like £2,300,000, but they have no business to be in this account at all: they do not touch the gross expenditure. What we want to see is the gross expenditure reduced, and then the appropriations-in-aid, if ho likes, can come in; but he cannot take the appropriations-in-aid and call them reductions in expenditure.

Mr. FISHER: I made it perfectly clear that the appropriations-in-aid were not a reduction of expenditure.

Sir F. BANBURY: I am very glad to hear it. But that does not follow from reading the newspapers that support the Government. In these the reduction is
always stated to be £6,385,000, and that is not what appears to be the case. On page 7 of the Estimates, in the last column, hon. Members will see the figures: net decrease, £6,104,653. But it is nothing of the sort. My right hon. Friend says that he has already told the House that that is so; then why does it appear in this Paper which the members of the Press Gallery have and on which they have formed their deduction of this net decrease of £6,104,000? It is only £3,800,000.
I want to say a few words about Appropriations-in-Aid. These, with the exception of a very small amount, a few thousands, are what the teachers have contributed to their own pensions. The whole of that sum has been oaken and has been credited as income received during the year. Such a course of accountancy, so far as I know, is utterly unknown in commercial circles. I happen to have the honour to be chairman of the Great Northern Railway Company. We have a pension fund for our officers. I took some little trouble the other day to find out how that pension fund is dealt with. We, the company, contribute nominally 2½ per cent., and out of their salaries the employés contribute 2½ per cent. As a matter of fact, we have contributed more than that, because we found there was a deficiency, and we contributed a larger sum, but our contributions are put in our expenditure account as a debit. We do not take the contributions of our employés on the other side as a credit! A fund has accumulated by which in after years we shall be able to meet the ever-growing increase in the pensions. Has the Pension Fund grown in connection with the Education Department? If hon. Members will turn to page 6 of the Estimates they will see that pensions this year amounted to £1,860,000, and last year £1,575,000, so that there is an increase of £284,600 in one year. The sum which has been paid to the teachers, instead of being taken as an asset, ought to have been put into another and separate account, a Pensions Fund Account. That would be absolutely clear. I think it is a right principle that the teachers should contribute to their pensions, and it should be done in a businesslike manner. In view of the stringent? circumstances of the country, that is an
important point. The entire expenditure is not put before the country in such a way as the people can clearly understand. I do not say that there is intentional "misrepresentation, but the figures are put in too favourable a way. In the footnote at the bottom of page 7 of the Estimates it says:
Any balances of the sums issued in respect of the Grants-in-Aid included in this Estimate which remain unexpended at the close of the financial year will not be liable to surrender at the close of the year.
Why not? The principle, which has been contended for over and over again, is that if there is an unexpended balance it should be handed over to the State for the reduction of debt at the end of the financial year. The arguments for it are undeniable, but I will not go into them now. I want to know why the Education Department should be the only Department departing from this particular principle, because it is one which tends to economy. Why should this Department, which is extravagant enough, depart from this time-honoured custom? I would like to know how long it has been going on, and what the sums amount to which have not been surrendered. I wish to give the Parliamentary Secretary an opportunity to reply, and I will not make any further remark except to say that I shall be exceedingly glad to go into the Division Lobby with the hon. Member opposite, but from quite a different motive. My motive is that some inequality is absolutely vital if we are to maintain our position as a great nation. The hon. Member's position is that he is a little annoyed with the Geddes Committee because they think that some people ought to go to Oxford and some ought to go to the board schools. There must always be social inequalities, and to move a reduction on a trumpery feeling of resentment of that description seems to me to be a little absurd. However, the hon. Member opposite has moved the reduction, and I shall support him for the reasons which I have stated.

Mr. ACLAND: The Committee will perhaps allow me, having a sort of hereditary interest in this subject, to occupy just a few minutes before, the Parliamentary Secretary to the Board of Education replies, and I will undertake to sit down in time to give the right hon. Gentleman the time which I understand he requires. With the exception of the
speech we heard last, the general opinion of the Committee has been that we do not wish to try to make the children of this country pay for the cost of the War. Even though in all other respects we are determined that economies shall be made, we wish to avoid economising at the expense of the child population, which, after all, had no responsibility for the War. Listening to the Debate it has seemed to me there were two or three danger points with regard to the unwise driving of this matter of economy. First I should like to mention the question of the size of the classes. I happened myself to be training as a teacher before the War at the University of Jena, where there were two students from British training colleges who had been given extra aid to get a third year's training at Jena. They were trained on the extremely interesting theory which an hon. Member for an English university just now so charmingly described, namely, that the individual passes through culture, epochs which the human race has passed through. When we had all three come to the end of the period of training and these two young men were going back after this year of theoretical training. I asked them what use they thought they would be able to make of what they had learned—and, as they were both intelligent, it had been very considerable—in the course of the last year. They replied: "None, because when we go back to English schools it is quite inevitable that nine-tenths of our time and attention will be taken up by maintaining discipline in our classes, and we shall have practically no opportunity to apply the theories which we have learned here and which we could never have learnt in England." They were then looking forward to having the ordinary number of pupils in their classes, 55 or 60 or even 65. It is true, and I have had enough experience of teaching to know it, that it is not, as might be supposed, twice as difficult to teach a class of 60 as one of 30. It is about ten times as difficult, and the difficulty of teaching increases extraordinarily rapidly as the numbers of the class increase. I should say it is twice as difficult to teach a class of 40 as one of 30, five times as difficult to teach one of 50 as one of 30, and ten times as difficult to teach one of 60 as one of 30. All the teachers I have talked to from the days I
was trained have agreed in putting the question of keeping the classes in elementary schools reasonably small above the question—to them in pre-War days a very important one—of their own salary. If one goes into an ordinary elementary school of 60 or 80 children, it is a perfect marvel to see how the teacher can manage to keep going the three or four different stages of children. I feel the Committee will agree that any real move backwards in the direction of making the classes larger will prove a terrible loss to education in this country.
The second danger point, I think, is with regard to the question of the opportunity of entry into the secondary schools. It is a Very remarkable thing that so great an educational authority as the headmaster of the Manchester Grammar School should have pointed out that in Manchester alone there were 1,400 children qualified to enter secondary schools in that city last year, for whom only 471 secondary school places were available, and that nearly 1,000 children had to be excluded altogether from the secondary schools. I do not object to an examination test, but I do object to an examination test which is higher for the children going into secondary schools with free places than it is for other children going there. It is essential, if there is a test, that one should try to keep out some of those who may be paid for but who have very little brains rather than to keep out those who come from the elementary schools and have to be helped in order to the benefits of secondary education. We have of course the Geddes Committee Report, but we also have another Report which perhaps some of us have not looked at quite recently—the. Report of the Committee on Scholarships and Free Places, under the very able chair man ship of one whose financial authority is, I think, not less great than that of Sir Eric Geddes himself, namely, the present Financial Secretary to the Treasury. He is a good financier and a good economist, and it is worth while recording that that Report, made after the War—I think in 1920—when the Government knew, or ought to have known, how great a financial stringency there was going to be, recommended that there should be——

Sir F. BANBURY: He was not in the Government then.

Mr. ACLAND: No, but he was a Member of the House of Commons who had taken a real interest in national economy and national expenditure.

Sir F. BANBURY: He was a social reformer.

Mr. ACLAND: That Committee recommended that there should be, and that it was urgently necessary that there should be, an increase of the percentage of free places from 25 to 40; that there should be an increase of our secondary schools so that there might be 20 school places in secondary schools to every 1,000 of the population; that free-place pupils should be assisted by maintenance allowances, and they actually went so far as to say, fourthly, that there should be, as soon as the state of our national finances allowed it, a discontinuance of all fees in secondary schools. I have only time to deal with one of these points, and that is with regard to assistance of students in secondary schools by maintenance allowances. I do not know whether it was acting upon the recommendation in that report or previously—I think, just previously—that the Board of Education issued a regulation that one-half of the expenditure of local education authorities on allowances of that kind should be made good to them, in order to make, as they said, higher education generally accessible to children and young persons capable of profiting by prolonged education. I should like the right hon. Gentleman to explain, because I am sure it will be touched upon in his reply, as it has been mentioned more than once, whether the meaning of Circular 143 is that these allowances of £ for £ upon what the local authorities could give to aid this particular type of education are really going to be withdrawn. I do not think that, when the Government, after the War, has had a report such as that to which I have referred, and after having themselves said, in November, 1919, that they would give these grants, it is conceivable, considering what we all know of the really great parsimony of local education authorities nowadays, and the enormous strain that the rates bring upon every payer of the rates, that they should refuse to make a grant of £1 for £1 where the local authority is willing to give something for this purpose.
My last point is that I am not satisfied that there is yet anything like a proper means of access from secondary schools to the universities. My right hon. Friend and Leader on this side, the Member for Paisley (Mr. Asquith) said the other day, when we were discussing education, that in his opinion there were sufficient means of access by scholarships and so on from the secondary schools to the universities. I think, however, that he is rather inclined too much to judge by his own extremely high standard. I have no doubt that people of his wonderful degree of promise and attainment can get sufficient and ample scholarships to take them on from the secondary school to the university; but my experience as Chairman of the London School of Medicine for Women, and as a member of the governing bodies of the East London College and the London School of Economics, teaches me that there is not yet anything like sufficient public provision to help really necessitous and deserving students to enter into places of university education of that type. In the course of my experience in the administration of those bodies, I have come up against astounding cases where parents have pinched in the most amazing way to get for their sons or daughters the advantage of a university education. I come across cases where a widow with, say, a fixed income of £200 or £210 a year has been able somehow or other so to screw and pinch as to send first one daughter and then another to the extraordinary expense of a medical training, and it is heartbreaking that all we can do with the assistance of the State is perhaps to screw out an exhibition of £10 or £15 to help the training of an extraordinarily promising student. The Ministry has had very careful reports from the Consultative Committee and other persons recommending a very considerable increase to the assistance given by the State in the form of scholarships and other forms of aid to students from secondary schools to universities, and unless we make access, not only into, but out of the secondary schools, easier than it is now, we shall be doing great damage to the future of our country. I understand we may have a future day for considering grants to universities, and on that I shall want to draw attention to the question of the present condition of grants to the Imperial College of Science and Technology. At present I carry out
my intention of giving way, though there is a great deal more that I should like to have said.

The PARLIAMENTARY SECRETARY to the BOARD of EDUCATION (Mr. Herbert Lewis): My right hon. Friend who has just spoken has claimed with justice that he has a hereditary interest in the question of education, and I recall with pride the fact that over thirty years ago I stood with Mr. Arthur Acland, one of the greatest and most distinguished Ministers of Education this country has ever had, by the cradle of one of the most important educational movements of this country—namely, that of bettering the condition and providing education for defective children. We have had several very interesting speeches, and I regret that some of the speeches have had to be locked up in the breasts of hon. Members who have been unable to deliver them. I had one disappointment because I always listen with interest to anything the hon. Member for Springburn (Mr. Macquisten) has to say, and I was rather expecting that he was about to develop his views upon Chinese education as applied to this country, which he adumbrated on a previous occasion.
We have in the last 18 months had a number of issues of national education very vigorously debated, not only in this House and in the newspaper Press, but also in other places where taxpayers and ratepayers commonly resort. The Board's administration has been subjected to two detailed inquiries—one by the hon. and gallant Member for Burton, as chairman of a committee, appointed by this House, and another by a committee under the chairmanship of Sir Eric Geddes. All I wish to say with regard to those inquiries, and also with regard to the criticisms passed on the Board of Education is that the Board of Education court inquiry in every possible way. We feel that we have absolutely nothing to fear from enquiry. We desire to meet every legitimate criticism which may be brought against us. We are not so foolish as to suppose that the system under which we work is flawless or that the education which it is our duty to supervise cannot be bettered. Our great anxiety is to discharge our obligations to Parliament in the best way possible. Any criticisms which may be directed against us we shall be only too glad to take into
account. Every man and every woman who is concerned with children in this country is, or ought to be, to some extent an education expert. It is a matter of general knowledge and one upon which everybody thinks that he or she ought to have an opinion. We welcome all these opinions.
I wish to reply at once to some of the detailed criticisms which we have heard this evening. The right hon. Member for the City of London (Sir F. Banbury) made some criticisms of the form of the Estimate. There is only one criticism of which I need take any serious notice. He referred to the note at the bottom of page 7, and suggested that the Board of Education were being treated differently from any other Government Department in not having to surrender their balances at the close of the year. The reply is that no Grants-in-Aid are ever surrendered, and that the Board of Education are not being placed in any exceptional position in this matter. The hon. Member for West Middlesbrough (Mr. T. Thomson) asked me some questions arising out of the White Paper. As he is not here I confine myself to saying that if he reads paragraphs 6, 8, and 9 of the White Paper more carefully than he has done hitherto, he will find that his questions have been answered and his apprehensions largely dispelled.

Sir F. BANBURY: Can the right hon. Member say what is the total amount of the balances?

Mr. LEWIS: It is impossible to give any estimate of the amount at the present moment. The right hon. Member for the Scottish Universities (Sir H. Craik) suggested that we now have more inspectors for less detailed and exacting work than we had formerly. The facts are briefly these. In 1900 there were in the elementary school inspectorate 341 persons—chief inspectors, divisional inspectors. His Majesty's inspectors, and sub-inspectors—whereas in 1922–23 the total for England and Wales was 260, or 81 less than was the case in 1900. In 1900 there were 31,234 public elementary school departments and the number of children on the books was 5,686,114. There are now 32,233 public elementary school departments and the number of children on the books on 1st April, 1921, was 5,930,652. It must be remembered also that since 1900 there has been a
large development of special subjects in schools which has necessitated the appointment of women as His Majesty's Inspectors in domestic subjects. There is, therefore, a very large reduction in the inspectorate of elementary schools. The hon. Member for West Leeds (Mr. J. Murray) brought forward a local complaint. He assumed that the Board of Education would recognise for grant an arrangement which has been arrived at between the Leeds Local Education Authority and the teachers, and he asked me why that arrangement had not been sanctioned by the Board of Education. The reply is that the Board of Education gave the Local Education Authority full notice that they would only pay by three equal instalments, and in spite of their warning the Local Authority took action before the Board had pronounced on the Burnham Scale, and when the Report was still under the consideration of the Board. The Board of Education have carried out their undertaking to Leeds, and they cannot treat Leeds differently from other authorities because Leeds ran ahead.
My hon. Friend the Member for Oxford University (Mr. Marriott) and the hon. Member for West Middlesbrough raised the important question of percentage grants. The hon. Member for West Middlesbrough expressed considerable apprehension lest any action should be taken, the effect of which would be to place the ratepayers in a less satisfactory position than they are in at present. I ought to say that the system of percentage grants, for which Parliamentary sanction was obtained in the Education Act, 1918, is to be the subject of investigation by a Departmental Committee, and pending the report of the Committee I do not propose to embark on an apology for the system, although I believe a very powerful argument can be constructed in its favour. I should like to draw attention to the fact that had it not been for the institution of percentage grants there is no doubt that in the period of expension that followed the Armistice the fabric of local administration would have been wrecked. The ratepayers were absolutely on the verge of revolt. The charges of education increased considerably at that time with the approval of nearly all parties in the country, and had the Board's grants continued upon a fixed capitation basis the charge to the tax-
payer, it is true, might have remained fairly constant, but I tremble to think what would have happened to the rates. Every ratepayer ought to be thankful to the percentage grant, because it relieved him of a burden which he could not possibly have borne. The incidence of the cost of education was shifted from 45 per cent, taxes and 55 per cent, rates to 56 per cent, taxes and 44 per cent, rates, and had it not been for the change in the distribution such efforts as our country has been able to make since the War would have been imperilled at the very outset. It is an entire mistake to suppose that the percentage grant has left the Board of Education without control over the local authorities. The contrary is the case.
With regard to the very important question of the feeding of school children, I think the apprehensions which have been expressed are really without foundation. This will be a matter of adjustment between Departments, and I heard with very great regret—although I think he rather qualified it afterwards—the Member for Shoreditch (Dr. Addison) refer to nine-tenths of the savings being on the stomachs of hungry children. I venture to say that not a single child will go hungry owing to this change in the arrangements, and as for the suggestion that it has been made in order to deprive the working classes of their power of resistance, and that it is a sinister move, I have heard of it for the first time and am in a position to give it an absolute, explicit, and emphatic denial.
With regard to the speech of the hon. and gallant Member for Accrington (Major Gray), whose long interest in and expert knowledge of education is so well known to the House, he put forward some very powerful criticisms of the insanitary conditions of some of the school premises in some parts of the country. Let me say at once that I most heartily welcome his criticisms. So far from resenting them, cases of this kind are just the kind that ought to be brought to the attention of the House and the country. Of course, there are twenty thousand schools in this country, and my hon. and gallant Friend has gone to the very bottom and the very dregs, but, so far as I am concerned, I do not object in the least to these dregs being stirred up. At the same time let us remember that they are drags. I listened to his state-
ment of the case and the detailed incidents which he gave. I think I can identify the last case of which he spoke. It certainly was one of the most shocking cases I ever heard of, but I am glad to be able to inform the Committee with regard to that case, that the shocking circumstances to which I have alluded were owing to the obstruction of a certain chairman of managers. He was a very old man and has been in Heaven now for twelve months, and we had better say nothing more about him. The Bishop of the diocese has taken a keen interest in the matter, the money has been raised, and, I am informed, that the necessary work of reparation and renovation was due to have been completed at the end of the holidays My hon. Friend is aware that the great difficulty in this, to a certain extent, is owing to the dual system. The position of the local managers has to be safeguarded. That is why events go so slowly in matters of that kind. I am thankful that my hon. and gallant Friend has raised these cases, and I give the assurance that the Board of Education will be glad to go into them further, and I feel sure that his intervention in the Debate on the point has done a great deal of good.
Three hon. Members referred to the question of foes in secondary schools. I believe that apprehension has been expressed that pupils of inferior calibre will be admitted into the schools as fee payers who have not the natural abilities which would justify the expenditure of public funds on their secondary education. That is a legitimate criticism, but I can assert without fear of contradiction that there is no cause for alarm. I have made careful inquiries into this matter within the last few days, and if that criticism had been substantiated it would have been a serious reflection on the administration of education, both centrally and
locally. I find that entrance examinations are necessary, not only for scholarships, but also for fee payers, and that these examinations have assumed a markedly competitive character, with the result, which the Committee will regret to learn, that large numbers of boys and girls who are fitted to profit by secondary education, and have proved themselves so by examination, have to be excluded. I am afraid I have not left myself sufficient time to refer in detail to the case of London referred to by the hon. Gentleman opposite. I regret that any controversy should have been aroused on it. But I have gone carefully into all the documents relating to the matter and my right hon. Friend has received deputation after deputation, and has been in correspondence with the London County Council, and has come to the conclusion, which I think is entirely justified, that the claim of London is one that cannot possibly be entertained. London has gained enormously by the Act of 1918. It is £2,000,000 a year better off in consequence of that Act. I hope London will not put into the mouths of those who object to the existence of percentage grants an argument which can be used against them.

It being Eleven of the Clock, the Chairman left the Chair to make his Report to the House.

Committee report Progress; to sit again upon Monday next.

The remaining Orders were read, and postponed.

Orders of the Day — ADJOURNMENT.

Resolved, "That this House do now adjourn."—[Colonel Leslie Wilson."]

Adjourned accordingly at one minute after Eleven o'Clock.